The relentless march of digital transformation means that many employers are having to find ways of reaching out to new pools of talent to attract different types of people into their businesses. No company is immune from this and even established technology companies are having to rethink their talent acquisition strategies.
My guest this week is Andreea Nicolescu Employer Branding and HR Communication Manager and at Temenos. Temenos is a market-leading Fintech business and has developed cutting edge strategies in both talent acquisition and talent management to facilitate digital transformation.
In the interview, we discuss:
• . The recruiting challenges at Temenos
- Attracting digital natives into roles that previously did not exist
- Moving from a transactional to a proactive model of talent acquisition
- Switching to new technologies to support the talent acquisition strategy
- The right candidates not the right number of candidates
- Engaging with new talent pools via targeted advertising
- Getting ROI by engaging, tracking and optimizing
- Developing talent via academies and boot camps
Andreea also talks about diversity in the workforce and what is next for Temenos.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Smart Dreamers. Smart Dreamers helps your HR team to accelerate talent acquisition with unique end to end marketing automation software built specifically for recruitment. Companies from L’Oreal and UiPath to Temenos and Jempack use smart dreamers to automate their talent acquisition channels and processes. Their clients are powering talent acquisition at a fraction of the cost and generating employer brand gravity in the process. This means more better candidates and lower cost per hire. No matter what recruitment software you’re using. Smart Dreamers integrates with all of them, a perfect fit for your software ecosystem. If you want more better candidates at a fraction of the cost, visit www.smartdreamers.com. that’s www.smartdreamers.com to learn more and schedule a demo.
Matt Alder [00:01:17]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 201 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I want to start by saying a big thank you to everyone for all the support and lovely feedback on the 200th episode. On top of that, this month has been yet another record one for listener numbers. Thank you all, I really appreciate it. The relentless march of digital transformation means that many employers are having to find ways of reaching out to new pools of talent in order to attract different types of people into their businesses. No company is immune from this and even established technology companies are having to rethink their talent acquisition strategies. My guest this week is Andreea Nicolescu, employer Branding and HR Communication Manager at Temenos. Temenos is a market leading fintech business and has developed cutting edge strategies in both talent acquisition and talent management in order to facilitate digital transformation. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
Hi Andreea and welcome to the podcast.
Andreea Nicolescu [00:02:24]:
Hi Matt, thank you for having me. Real pleasure being here.
Matt Alder [00:02:28]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:02:33]:
So my name is Andreea Nicolescu. I am employer branding and HR communication manager for Temenos. I joined in 2016 as part of the global HR team.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
So could you tell us a little bit more about what Temenos does and the recruiting challenges that you.
Andreea Nicolescu [00:02:52]:
Yeah, so Temenos is the world leader in banking software development. What we do is that we provide financial institutions of any size, anywhere in the world the software that they need to thrive in the digital banking age. So basically we do this by building, delivering and supporting the world’s best package, upgradable and open banking software. And what’s exciting is that we’ve been doing this for over 25 years. We’ve just had our 25 year anniversary in November last year. So it means that we really are true domain specialists and we’re very, very proud of that. You were asking me about our main recruitment challenges, so when I joined back in 2016, the company was going through big growth. So today we are the fastest growing listed software company in the world. And because we’re growing so fast and because we’re constantly innovating and developing new products, this of course has an impact on our recruitment processes. So if in 202016 we’re around 4,000 people, we are today around 6,000 people with offices around the world in 64 countries. And we are really a diverse group representing over 90 nationalities. So you can imagine how growing quite fast is challenging both from a quantity point of view and from finding quality candidates point of view. So our main challenge then, and that remains so today, was that we were growing a lot and we needed to bring in fresh blood. We needed to bring in a new generation of people who are more digitally native and who were more fit and equipped to work for jobs that didn’t even exist a few years ago. Right. So we realized quite early that we needed to change our talent attraction strategy for a more bespoke one. We needed to find the right skill set that we wanted to attract and see how we could pair those with the jobs that we had available. Now this is coupled with yet another challenge that is something true to our industry and not just to Seminoles that often wise people might not know how many types of opportunities fintech has for a job seeker. We’re not just looking for people who know banking, we’re looking for people who know sales, marketing, UX, cloud, etc. Really exciting and really diverse. So again, our challenge was to find a lot of people, and it still is. We’re constantly hiring and constantly growing and finding people in this very diverse groups of skill sets. So what we did is we created programs dedicated to certain groups of people to help pair them with the positions that we have. And then secondly, we decided, as I said, to go for a very targeted approach in the way we actively seek candidates. So move from that very transactional model of recruitment. I have a job, you come and apply and everything’s gonna be fine. To a more proactive approach to kind of be where people spend their time naturally, whether that’s on Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, whatever, and just become part of their everyday online journey.
Matt Alder [00:06:18]:
So there a number of things I kind of want to dig into, in a bit more detail there because, you know, there’s some fascinating challenges and it sounds like you’re taking some really innovative approaches to solve them. Before we go into a bit more detail around, around, around some of those initiatives, how, you know, how has your recruiting function evolved as the companies, the companies grow?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:06:42]:
That’s actually a very interesting. That was also part of our talent attraction strategy change. So we decided that nobody else can tell our story better than us. So we created an in house recruitment team almost five years ago. Four years ago, sorry. And the global recruitment team works as almost as an internal recruitment team agency. They hire from all over the world for positions. We decided to move away from agencies that are quite as expensive and you know, they don’t tell our story as well as we do and they don’t, you know, perhaps infuse that same kind of culture into their discourse and don’t, you know, make the candidate feel like they’re part of the internal team. And another change that we had in our, in our recruitment process is that we decided that apart from a very strong recruitment team, we needed to pair it with an employer branding function, which is how my job appeared in the company and my department afterwards. And then the third change was to switch to new technology that would help our recruitment team have a more efficient process. So we switched our ATS system recently. We chose something that could easily be integrated and help recruiters work with not just applicant tracking sort of system, but could also integrate with social media or they could also have access to reports and hire faster and more efficiently. Because our recruitment team is constantly working on identifying the right candidates, not the right number of candidates, if that makes sense. So it’s really key for us to attract the right kind of people, not just a million people at once.
Matt Alder [00:08:36]:
You mentioned that, you know, as part of that strategy, you’re now sort of proactively reaching out to potential candidates where they are and targeting them. How are you doing that?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:08:51]:
Well, because as I said, we hire globally and obviously each region has their own culture, each region has their own different needs. And we discovered that for different groups of candidates, there are different channels that we can approach them through. So if, say I am hiring in business solutions in Japan, we know that our candidates in Japan prefer to read their online content in their native language. They spend most of their time online. They don’t necessarily use Facebook or LinkedIn that much. So we create through a recruitment marketing tool called Smart Dreamers. We create targeted ads that go through that channel where we know we’re going to find that talent pool that we’re interested in. So rather than just posting a job on LinkedIn and saying come apply to us, we have jobs open in Japan. We try to find candidates where they would normally spend their time online and approach them there through targeted ads, through a landing page or, you know, by going to events, by creating events for them, et cetera. If, however, I’m hiring in Germany, I know that people in Germany spend a lot of time on Amazon. So I will invest on advertising in Amazon and I will try to find that group of people that I’m interested in on Amazon and target them with ads. Now, obviously, targeted ads are not just the entire strategy. We still have to organically reach our audience for any type of campaign, but this more tailored approach of targeting specific groups of people. Does a web developer spend his time more on Twitter? Does he spend more of his time on Instagram? So I find out where they are and be present there as part of.
Matt Alder [00:10:47]:
Their day to day fantastic stuff. And that, that sort of, I suppose that that outreach to what people would call sort of more passive candidates. You’re obviously using technology to help you do that. What kind of results are you, are you seeing now that your strategy sort of shifted in that, in that direction?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:11:06]:
It’s actually a very big transformation for us. So first of all, and this sort of ties into the challenges that I was talking to you about earlier. We realized that we were kind of always swimming in the same sea, we were always fishing in the same pond. You know, the people who know us for our product, they already want to come work with us. You know, we know the passive candidates that were kind of always circling around, but the unknown passive candidates, that’s where we weren’t able to reach that sort of group. So that’s where by working with smart dreamers and using their technology, we were able to tap into new territory. We were able to reach a new pool of candidates that we had otherwise not necessarily not found. But you know, we weren’t able to break through into their day to day. So the results that we’re seeing now is that we are able to find more relevant candidates much faster because we engage with them in a way that is not necessarily intrusive and we are able to track that effort and optimize it as we go. So that’s really where we’ve seen a big return on investment.
Matt Alder [00:12:24]:
As you say, you’re a well established software company, but as we know, even technology companies are going through a state of digital transformation. As industries change and consumers change and technology change, how’s that kind of affecting you from a recruitment and training perspective? Have you got initiatives to sort of provide training to people? Are you just looking for people with exactly the right skills? How are you dealing with this sort of sense of digital transformation?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:12:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you can’t walk around saying that you are the leader in digital banking without, you know, walking the talk. So as long as we are constantly innovating as a company, we should also put that into our recruitment strategy. So we realized that whilst we can start looking for candidates with the exact skill set that we need and that might work, it’s not going to work fast enough and it’s probably not going to be the best idea in this day and age. So we decided to create very tailored programs. So a good example of that was the Temna Sales Academy, which is our graduate career program. And through that we are developing what we call our next generation of sales champions. We wanted to infuse some fresh blood, as I said, into our sales force. Some digitally native individuals who could work in sales, marketing, functional business solutions, technical software and UX business solutions. So basically what we do with this training program is that we select people from all around the world who come to Luxembourg where they spend around six months, they live together and they work together and they go through an extensive training program that’s been especially designed for them and for the skills that we want them to have after graduating and that we know are going to ensure that they’re successful in their role in temenos. So after six months they go back into the regions where they are part of the temenos teams and they continue their training by working with senior salespeople, with senior business solutions or marketing colleagues, etc. So we really prepare them, you know, we take what skill sets they’ve had from university and we really prepare them for the fintech industry and enable them to be successful. From day one. We are at the third generation of Sales Academy and it’s been going fantastic and we want to continue doing so. And a quite similar program is something called the Temenos Business Solutions boot camp, which addresses a more experienced crowd. So I was talking about always fishing in the same pond. We used to find people who are very good at their job, who had worked in fintech or had worked in banking, but were lacking some of the key aspects that we needed for them to be successful from day one. So we decided why not teach them those skills in a shorter, more compressed training program and then Stop rejecting specific candidates because they needed one more nudge or one more presentation training or something. So we decided to create again a bespoke training program, a three month training program for them called Bootcamp. They would come in similarly to the Academy. They would go through this training and work with the best of our business solutions team who would train them and then they could move back into their regions and sort of shift their career and take it to the next level. So these are just a couple of examples of dedicated training programs that have accelerated our recruitment, that have taken it a bit to the next level and ensure that we not only attract the right people, but we also retain them better.
Matt Alder [00:16:22]:
Right at the start of our conversation, you mentioned that you’re a very diverse organization. How do you sort of maintain and increase that diversity from a talent acquisition perspective?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:16:35]:
Yeah. So for instance, the Sales Academy is a very good example. So we bring in people from all around the world. I think last year we had around 19 different nationalities, 17 different languages spoken only within the Academy, which is a group of 30 people. And with temenos in general, over our history of 25 years, we’ve been naturally sort of very diverse and very inclusive. Our board of directors is made up of people from all over the world. It’s both male and female. We really embrace quite an open culture. Everyone’s ideas matter, really do have that entrepreneurial spirit, but with the reassurance of a big company behind. And actually, if we look at the past four years, the proportion of women, for example, in temenos has increased from 28% to 34%, which is quite a lot. It’s a lot above industry average. Now, there’s still a lot of work to be done and that’s one of our main goals and always top of mind, to bridge that gender gap and continue to attract more women in technology. Coming back to your question, we haven’t really had a specific strategy over the years to attract a diverse workforce because it’s come very naturally to us.
Matt Alder [00:18:00]:
So, final question. What’s next? What does the future hold? What you sort of looking forward to the most about the next 18 months, two years?
Andreea Nicolescu [00:18:09]:
The future is really exciting for us, I have to say, because as I said, we’re constantly innovating and for us that means we’re constantly going to create new jobs. From a recruitment perspective, we might be hiring in eight months, jobs that didn’t even exist today. Products are evolving, our teams are evolving. We’re really excited to see what our next generation of Academy trainees bring in. We’re really excited to see them thrive and succeed in their roles because what happens is that with each generation, we ensure a very nice sort of ripple effect that turns our new employees into brand ambassadors who are proud to work for Temenos and happy to recommend their friends. So we’re really excited to see with all these technology changes how that’s going to transform the way our employees perceive Temos as well.
Matt Alder [00:19:09]:
Andreea, thank you very much for talking to me.
Andreea Nicolescu [00:19:12]:
Thank you very much Matt. Lovely to be here.
Matt Alder [00:19:15]:
My thanks to Andreea Nicolescu. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts 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. If you live in a country where you can access Pandora, the show is also available there as well. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can 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.
