The ever-shortening shelf life of skills, fast-changing business priorities, ageing populations, and changing attitudes to work means that retaining the right talent is not only more difficult than ever, it is also likely to remain so for years to come.
It’s not surprising, then, that Talent Leaders are starting to think differently about the structure of their function to remove silos and foster collaboration between Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, L&D and other vital people functions.
So what kind of overarching vision is needed to drive effective cross-function thinking, and what strategic role should TA play internally within the organization?
My guest this week is Hélène Loine, VP of Human Resources at Ekkiden. Hélène has a background in recruiting, working at rapidly scaling companies. Her focus at Ekkiden is building a shared vision of employee experience to connect HR silos to improve hiring and retention.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The TA challenges in scaling different types of business
• The importance of understanding your target audience
• Automation and AI
• Using technology and a shared vision to connect the silos in HR
• Different ways of thinking about talent
• Building a people-centric talent function
• Looking at employee experience holistically to drive retention
• Personalization
• How can TA use data and insights to contribute strategically inside the business?
• What does the future of TA look like?
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI’s market leading talent intelligence platform, helps organizations retain top performers, upskill and reskill their workforce, recruit talent efficiently and reach diversity goals. Eightfold’s patented deep learning artificial intelligence platform is available in more than 155 countries and 24 languages, enabling cutting edge enterprises to transform their talent into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit eightfold.ai.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 586 of the Recruiting Future podcast.
The ever-shortening shelf life of skills, fast-changing business priorities, ageing populations, and changing attitudes to work means that retaining the right talent is not only more difficult than ever, it is also likely to remain so for years to come.
It’s not surprising, then, that Talent Leaders are starting to think differently about the structure of their function to remove silos and foster collaboration between Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, L&D and other vital people functions.
So what kind of overarching vision is needed to drive effective cross-function thinking, and what strategic role should TA play internally within the organization?
My guest this week is Hélène Loine, VP of Human Resources at Ekkiden. Hélène’s background is in recruiting, working at rapidly scaling companies. Her focus at Ekkiden is building a shared vision of employee experience to connect HR silos to improve hiring and retention.
Hi, Hélène, and welcome to the podcast.
Hélène: Hello, Matt.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hélène: Sure. Thank you for the invitation. First, my name is Hélène. I’m French. And I’m currently VP HR at Ekkiden, which is a European consulting company, operating in different countries, currently several over Europe. We are providing digital, industrial and sustainable competencies for clients. I joined there three and a half years ago when the team was only counting a few people. We grew very fast from 10 to 250 in three years. I think I’m sure we’re going to talk about it later. And I am a VP. As a VP HR, I am supervising to say the whole candidate and employee lifecycles from the talent acquisition to the talent development, cultural design, so until the exit.
And before that I was living in Germany for seven years where I worked as a HR business partner, focusing also on recruitment but also in operations for the hotel chain Premier Inn that was currently expanding on the German market. And when I joined there was one hotel, and when I left there were 33, and I think now they are even over 50 and the expansion is still going on.
Matt: Wow, so kind of scaling businesses is something that you’ve done at least in over couple of times now. Let’s talk about Premier Inn to start with. What were the talent acquisition challenges with growing a hotel chain like that quickly? How did you get round them? What kind of lessons did you learn?
Hélène: Yeah, it was very tough, but I learned a lot because Premier Inn is very known in the UK, but is completely unknown in Germany. We were recruiting for the hospitality industry for a brand that was still unknown on the German market at that time. So, hospitality doesn’t have always very good reputation in terms of working conditions. So, it was not always very easy to attract talents. There was a big opportunity for an HR approach that would break with the traditional practices in force at the time, and strong culture that was implemented by Natalie [unintelligible 00:04:51] in order to quickly offer competitive working conditions and be able to also attract and recruit people.
And at the same time in Germany, it was quite interesting because there was a wave of immigration of political and war refugees. So, we worked together with associations to help integrating these people that were arriving. And there were some very good success stories, particularly for people who arrived, who didn’t speak the language, and who after solid training in internal development programs were able to become team managers, for example. So, many, many different situations that taught me that it’s not so simple to recruit personalities instead of looking for a perfect CV.
Matt: Amazing. That’s so interesting to have been through that experience. I suppose what the similarities and what are the differences in terms of what you do now? So, scaling a consulting business, what’s the same, what’s very different?
Hélène: Matt, it’s always, I think a question of adapting to the industry you’re working on, because in my case, I didn’t know anything about hospitality, nor consultancy before I worked for those industries. And in the end, I think it’s a little bit like marketing. You are first to understand the target audience to find out what they are really looking for, offer them the right conditions that will suit them, and then adapt the speech and what you’re offering to be convincing. There are clear difference, of course, in terms of profiles between those two industries. At Ekkiden, we also are receiving over 30,000 applications a year, whereas at Premier Inn at the beginning, it was very few.
I would say that what is also, of course, very similar is the speed of growth, as you mentioned, because when you’re recruiting a lot and recruiting fast, you are facing real cultural and identity challenges within the company, you need to quickly find out which values you have, which personalities will match them and which environments you need to develop to grow them. So, I think it was like more as situational similarities to say.
Matt: And I suppose to use that comparison to get a benchmark as to where we are right now, because this year has been the year where we’ve done a lot of talking about AI and automation. And I know that a lot of employers have been effectively using some of the tools that are currently available in their talent acquisition activities. How would you have benefited in the past from some of the tools that are available now?
Hélène: I think first that we would never be able to process 30,000 applications a year without any AI or automation. When we are talking about AI and automation, it’s not just use in the recruitment process, but also throughout the entire employee lifecycle. I think for the time at Premier Inn, it would have been very beneficial to use AI or automation to be able to generate more applications. For example, like using retargeting in recruitment, automating a bit more like the sourcing. However, since the target groups are very different, I’m not sure it would have worked at this time, but maybe more like trying to automating tasks that don’t add value in the employee lifecycle to be able to focus more on things that really matter, such as support, culture, events and even sometimes simple things such as listening or passing on knowledge, for example.
Matt: Interesting. And how are you using the tools now? How is it part of the, I suppose not just TA, but the whole of HR in terms of what you’re doing?
Hélène: Well, we are connecting all our tools together. We are making sure that the different silos of HR are connected. When we grew from 0 to 230, we gradually developed the different topics in HR, because first, it was about how to attract and hire people, and then it was more about how make sure they will stay and they will stay with us for a long time.
The different functions of HR started to connect between each other and to communicate strongly together. So, it started to be there first in recruitment, of course, but then also in all topics related to data to be able to generate automated reports, for example, or predictive analytics for workforce planning, or to automatize also like emails or different touch points in the whole employee lifecycle to be again better focused on things that really matter that machines are not able to replace yet. [giggles]
Matt: So, I think the interesting thing when we’re talking about scaling business. So, as you say, you start off talent acquisition is the main thing. As the business gets bigger, HR starts to split into these silos, but now they’re working together much more closely. Is that just driven by the technology, or is it a different way of thinking about talent, the people in your business?
Hélène: Well, in our company, definitely the move, but I think overall, in general, in HR, it is slowly moving to or evolving to a very people centric departments in HR. They can’t be just like silos next to each other. They have to work more and more together to collaborate, to communicate strongly, sharing the data to collaborate effectively.
In Ekkiden, we call the HR department like the Pops because for people operations. And it’s a department that focuses really on streamlined operations that can use data from all the different silos to drive the decisions and projects and support tangible business results. And you have more and more problems of retention. The market is very competitive. There’s nothing new in there. So, companies must focus on the employee experience and culture. This is over all the different silos. You cannot just differentiate those. They must work together.
Matt: Just tell us a little bit more about how that works from a retention perspective.
Hélène:I think that the fact that if you are focusing on– You are taking the employee experience as a wall and not a talent acquisition strategy and talent development strategy, compensation and benefit strategy, and that you just make sure to understand who is your target group and what kind of different things you can offer them throughout the whole journey, then you are even stronger in terms of retention. Because talent acquisition can also can communicate on market trends, on compensation and benefit strategies, give you inputs on how to work better internal recruitment, for example, for career development purposes, learning and development certifications that will be key on the market and so on.
You can straighten your compensation and benefits strategies, communicating better with talent acquisitions or have a stronger personal development plan talking also with talent acquisitions or knowing better the market. So, I think if you take it as a whole, you will have personalized experiences for each of the employees, better understanding the environment and better understanding what they really need. So, yeah.
Matt: That makes perfect sense. I think the value of the lens that talent acquisition has externally brought internally, and as you say, incredibly important. I suppose that brings me on to the final question, which is, what do you think the future of TA looks like? We talked a bit about technology. What sort of impact is that going to have over the next two to five years?
Hélène: Probably more AI even [laughs] to streamline repetitive tasks and allow recruiters to be more focused on strategic aspects. Because as I was saying before, I think recruiters are no longer just sourcing and placing talents. Instead, the function is really more as a strategic partner for the organization that must have deep understanding of broader business landscapes. And recruiters of tomorrow are I think expected to be more on top of market dynamics, competitive positioning, industry specific challenges, and also influences of the HR strategy, as I said before, in compensation and benefits learning and development.
But I think as well, there will be talent acquisition, probably more pressure around transparency and conditions that you’re referring to employees. There is a lot of legislative pushes currently in Europe around, for example, pay transparency directives in the European Parliament. That’s where European companies will be required to share information and salaries, taking care of gender pay gaps, make sure that it will be not longer than something like 5%. So, it will be like a key business and centric business actor, I think.
Matt: Hélène, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hélène: Thank you.
Matt: My thanks to Hélène.
You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for @recruitingfuture. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
