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A Successful Recruitment Path: Interview with Adam Rabinovitch

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“Building a network and community around you so that people know who you are, trust you, and can come to you to ask for help or information is invaluable.” – Adam Rabinovitch, EMEA Senior Technical Recruiter in AI, Engineering, Machine Learning, Big Data & Data Science at Databricks, speaks to us about developing a career in Recruitment. As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Adam Rabinovitch at Databricks, who began his career as a B2B and B2C Telesales Consultant at Axis for Business before moving to work as a B2B and B2C Membership Sales Consultant at Fitness First.  With his recruitment career beginning in August 2009, Adam transitioned to the roles of Resourcer, Junior Recruiter, and later Senior Technical and Commercial Recruiter at eSynergy Solutions, while serving as Director and Co-Founder of Abso-Fashion-Lutely alongside this post from January 2013. Adam also founded AI Community Jobs in May 2013, where he continues to serve as CEO alongside his current roles. Adam’s recruitment career continued with an international role as Principal Technical and Commercial Recruiter for Opus Recruitment Solutions in January 2014, and an 18-month term as Head of Recruitment at CognitionX from August 2016. In December 2017, Adam founded and became an Advisory Board Member for AI-Adam; a role he continues alongside his current responsibilities at Databricks and AI Community Jobs. Adam joined the team at Beamery in February 2018, initially serving as Senior Technical Recruiter and Evangelist before ascending the ranks to become Global Technical Recruiting Lead and Evangelist in January 2019, and later moving to Databricks to assume his current role there in April 2020. Can you tell us how you got into Recruitment and why? Recruitment chose me, I didn’t choose it! When I first started in the field back in 2009, I joined a firm as a Resourcer, and later jumped into becoming a Principal Recruiter and Managing Consultant. Around that time was when I first started to get the knack of the technology side of things. I’m more of a techie recruiter, so I like to understand the technology I’m talking about and how it actually works. I do a bit of coding and development in my spare time, because technology has always intrigued me and I like to play around with it, and doing that gave me my first taste of cloud and the power of Big Data and AI.  Recruiting in the technology sector and hearing about the technologies that candidates had used to support companies made me want to go back and learn more about them to understand them and boost my credibility. In doing so, I could present clients with profiles and explain in depth what candidates had achieved and how they had achieved it rather than just looking for keywords. I love recruitment, it’s really enjoyable. Although I’ve moved through a variety of different companies throughout my career—having started off externally working for a recruitment agency and moving into internal recruitment after a recommendation to the company from one of my clients—I’ve always been in the AI and data space, and to see where it’s changed and how things have moved forward now is pretty crazy. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the Recruitment sector in terms of AI and technology? I think our biggest challenge is that there’s still a lot of debate around AI and how it’s utilised. It’s not going to replace recruiters, and if you use AI in the right way, it’ll help you get more things done properly. There’s a lot you can do with it. The market is moving fast, so it’s just a matter of understanding the different types of things that people are doing with AI—whether that’s creating an enterprise, software, or platform—and whether it’s being utilized in start-ups or scale-ups. I’m fortunate to never have really had the same challenges in terms of my recruitment pool that other recruiters face. I set up a number of user groups and forums on LinkedIn when I initially got into Recruitment to bolster myself and gain some credibility, and I ended up building a community around my specialism in AI and Big Data that I’m still drawing on even now. A lot of the people I work with have stayed in touch and become friends—in fact, I still know the first person I placed in my first ever Recruitment job—which has really helped to further my career as well as theirs. My last three jobs, including my current role, have all come about as a result of recommendations made by former clients, and they’ve all said that my technical knowledge and network has been hugely beneficial in understanding an organisation’s needs, finding the right people to fill those needs, and helping organisations understand the calibre they need to hire. I’ve created initiatives to advertise jobs in the field that aim to unite people with those positions, and my communities on LinkedIn bring together candidates and managers with no need for recruiters. Sometimes those discussions are about jobs, but it’s also just about giving people a platform to discuss a common interest together and giving back to the candidates and clients that I either was working with or wanted to work with. One challenge I think we’re all facing in the sector is finding a way to keep your pipeline of candidates moving and developing. For me, Recruitment is about finding out what it is that candidates want to get into or learn and matching them with not just jobs, but opportunities to learn and expand their knowledge. There is an element of sales in terms of selling yourself as a recruiter with an opportunity to a candidate initially, but once that connection is made, if you focus on building the relationship between you even if they don’t take up an opportunity

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An anonymous blog regarding the impact of furloughing team members.

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Don’t let lack of loyalty in your furloughed employees represent lack of loyalty in the company  I read a statistic when Corona virus first emerged as a threat across the World that more people will face bankruptcy as a result of this pandemic than will actually die from it. On the surface, that’s a good thing – people recover from bankruptcy a lot better than they recover from death – but the possibility of either puts people into an element of fear. The reality for business owners and directors is that this threat to them personally only emerges if the companies they oversee no longer become viable and cease to exist. This will happen in some cases, but in others leaders will remain in post, possibly having to make cuts to the workforce or furlough non-business critical colleagues in order to give the best chance of survival to the trading entity they control. Whilst furlough is a highly beneficial tool, it creates significant uncertainty for those placed into it. Going from a position of working hard every day to help maintain business to suddenly being asked not to contribute places that employee into the “at risk” category regardless of recent performance. Clearly the flip-side of furlough is that it stops people being made redundant immediately and preserves their employment status, but the reality is that, had the scheme not existed, that person would now be out of work with the prospect of loss of income and the need to look elsewhere in an uncertain and overcrowded job market. That prospect, coupled with the uncertainty as to when it might end, will put people into the fight or flight mode that is a natural reaction when under threat. Those furloughed colleagues have little or no control over what happens in the company and when and how their employment status will return. Losing the ability to work removes that control, so they will look at what they can have influence over. This will mean that they look at their finances, tighten their belts, and if there has been a loss of income may look at how they can remedy this. The reality is that the lockdown process for the majority means less spending and so reduced income during furlough doesn’t affect the day-to-day budget, but it does affect the long term thinking. That money sat in savings for future holidays and house improvements now may be needed to cover a period of being out of work or it may be required to fund the start up of a new venture – nobody knows what the employment market will look like when some kind of “normality” returns. Applying theory to the madness, a furloughed employee is only left with the physiological part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs whereas a month ago they may have had all elements in place from the role they performed. Without getting too carried away with the theory, losing self-actualisation, esteem, belonging and some aspects of Maslow’s safety could be seen as a massive disruption in people’s lives. The key is honest communication during this time but the reality is that situations are changing on a daily basis so you cannot give guarantees to employees, but in return they cannot give them back to you. This period will see people looking at what jobs they might be able to do, connecting with recruitment advisors and considering other options – these are all natural responses when income is threatened. People may be considering new careers, new opportunities just in case they are no longer available to return to their current roles. Business owners and directors have to accept this. If they were suddenly placed in the same situation then they would do the same. It doesn’t represent a lack of loyalty in the company – the majority of people on furlough want to work, they want to support the company and they want some control of their professional destiny, but in this difficult time they can’t have it. When they return, the elements of trust and motivation will play a big part in getting them fully back in the fold. A recently furloughed friend told me he realised he didn’t love the company he worked for like he thought he did, but his realisation through this was that he loved working with his colleagues and that’s a significant difference. Things won’t return to normality overnight when people are asked back to their roles. They will need reassurance, greater levels of clarity on the financial position and a clear way of making themselves “business critical” so the cloud of uncertainty will not darken their lives again. This will be a challenge. Some talented people will seek new careers, some may come back slightly less motivated, others may look to become even more engaged. It’s important, though, to not judge people on how they react during furlough or question their loyalty before it happened, because uncertainty reigns in this difficult period.

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Interview with Sian Brown about developing a career in HR Leadership

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“If you have confidence, you can jump into new challenges without needing to know absolutely everything. If we all knew the same and our teams were all the same, then we’d never get anywhere new.” – Sian Brown, Head of People at FitFlop, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership. As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Sian Brown at FitFlop, who began her career as a Sales Consultant at Esporta before moving to Leisurejobs to work as a Recruitment Consultant, and later becoming Retail Resourcing Partner at Monsoon Accessorize. In September 2013, Sian joined the team at FitFlop as Resourcing Manager, later ascending the ranks to become Head of Resourcing & Talent before taking on her current role in July 2018. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Interestingly, my first experience in HR came far before my first role did, as I actually did work experience in an HR department of a big hotel chain when I was 15. What I experienced of HR—or Personnel, at that time—was all admin. I remember packing letters into envelopes and uploading notes onto computers, and I noticed that the team were boxed into a small room rather than being integrated into the business. Up until that point, I really would have liked to pursue a People role, but the experience put me off, so I stepped away from HR and went into Sales at Esporta when I left college instead. After a year there, I wanted to move to London, so I fell into recruiting for an agency. I worked there for two years and absolutely loved it, but I found that what I enjoyed most was the candidate experience element; being able to go on their journey with them and placing them into roles. I wanted to see their journeys all the way through, so I decided to go down the in-house recruitment route and moved to Monsoon Accessorize. While I was there, I did my CIPD Level 3 and learnt a lot of theory, but at the time I thought that the Personnel Development side of HR was a little bit stagnant and decided to stick with Recruitment.  I didn’t know too much about FitFlop when I was initially approached about a role there, but their vibrant culture attracted me from the first interview. They’re a very innovative, entrepreneurial company led by an experienced female founder, which was a real pull for me.  When I joined, we had quite a small team and I was the only recruiter, so my whole role focused on that at first, but being part of a smaller company meant that Recruitment became integrated into the wider HR team. As a result, I found myself naturally gaining more and more hands-on experience across the HR realm while still focusing on the Resourcing side. My role later broadened to include Learning and Development, and then in 2018, I moved to the Head of People role and became responsible for HR across our international locations as well as the UK, reporting directly to our Global People Director. I think my route into HR has been quite interesting, because a lot of people generalise and then specialise, but I got into it because I loved Recruitment, and I still do. It’s always been what I’m passionate about, and I’m really fortunate that I still do that in my role. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? The biggest one for us at the moment is definitely the COVID-19 crisis. We operate across Asia, the USA, the UK, and Germany, which have all been hit fairly hard. We first started hearing about what was happening in China with our China team having to work from home, but we didn’t expect how quickly it would spread. We’re a very close-knit company, so we’ve been in it together from the start, but every country is at a different stage and has a different way of dealing with it, so it has been a challenge that will undoubtedly lead to changes in the way we work in the future.  We’ve had a version of flexible working called ‘smarter working’ that concentrates on output rather than hours since before the crisis, and I think that combined with our strong culture has really helped us manage while working from home. If you don’t have a strong culture, there’s less unity and support within the team, so remote working can pose more of a challenge, but we’ve been surprised by how much ours has helped. It hasn’t been without its challenges when it comes to things like product design and development meetings, but I think we’ve embraced new ways of working well, and we’ve seen that our people leaders have been able to lead their teams effectively through something we’ve never experienced before. HR isn’t built on micromanagement and parent-child relationships, it has to be adult to adult, and I think the current restrictions have pushed us into seeing that when we allow our staff that freedom and autonomy, there’s a lot of opportunity and achievement to be had.  It’s also definitely changed our communication. Where at times we as a sector weren’t being transparent enough or communicating enough because we’d rather wait to do so until we had all the answers, the current situation has made us step up and send things out and speak to our teams more regularly. HR has always been naturally cautious, but we don’t have time to do that now; we need to be bold and do what feels right. There’s no manual or policy on dealing with COVID-19, we just have to act and react. We’ve seen flexibility, commitment, and teamwork on such a scale that the challenge now is how to best take

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Developing a career as a business leader: Interview with Bill Carr

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“Having a personal relationship with somebody within your network—or somebody within your network’s network—who has been through the challenges you face and will gladly give you advice and pointers is invaluable. Reach out and get involved!”- Bill Carr, CEO of Carpe Diem, a specialist Digital Transformation Agency, speaks to us about developing a career as a business leader. As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some industry leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Bill Carr at Cape Diem, who began his career in Marketing with the ASICS Corporation before moving to Brand New Media to work as an Account Manager. In 1999, Bill founded the Carpe Diem web design and digital marketing agency, where he continues to serve as CEO.  Alongside this role, Bill has co-founded the online portal ‘My Kids Day Out’, and has served as both a Committee Member and Chair of the Cheshire division of the Institute of Directors. Can you tell us how you got into a leadership role and why? Initially, I went to university to study Mechanical Engineering. I didn’t particularly think that I was going to use that as my career and wasn’t enjoying it, so I left and went to work for ASICS. That was my first experience of the commercial world, and a real learning curve. I was thrown in at the deep end, so I had to grow up quickly, but I fell in love with the commercial side of work and decided not to go back to university. Instead, I worked my way up within the company, eventually taking on the role of Marketing Manager. During my term, the company experienced some challenges that gave me my first experience of managing people and our relationships with clients and suppliers in times of adversity. That taught me a lot about how to negotiate and deal with people, and I decided to move on to pastures new with those skills. After that, I went to work for a digital agency based in Leeds as an Account Manager, tasked with managing projects and people, and I found that the agency side of things was a completely different world, especially in terms of the pace. I used to work with agencies a lot when I was on the client side, and I’d always had this perception that they’d just have meetings for the sake of it without doing much, but when I went to work for one, I realised very quickly that that wasn’t the case. There are a lot of different pressures with agency work, and where my grounding in the sports industry was very analytical and finance-focused, the agency didn’t operate that way at all. I left that agency and started Carpe Diem when I was 21, and have run the company ever since then. We started taking on a few members of staff within the first 12 months and grew within the first three years to about the size we wanted to get to. Our numbers are growing, but we’re a solid company with a solid workforce now—although it hasn’t been easy.  When I first started out, my experience of management and leading a team was all taken from being a football captain, so I was quite good at driving a team on, but not at putting an arm around people when they needed it. That’s been the hardest thing for me to learn.  You have to be a lot like a chameleon, and I tend to find that I change my personality and the way that I communicate with people an awful lot depending on who I’m talking to. I try to set an example of what I expect, lead according to it, and hope that the team will follow that. Are there any strategies you would say have been particularly helpful when leading your teams? We run a lot of internal design sprints and strategy sprints, which bring the whole organisation together. They give us a lot of clarity—not only in terms of why it is the staff are being asked to do something, but in terms of where we’re heading as a business. They also provide an opportunity for changes to filter up rather than being a top-down organisation, as well as get the team involved to make decisions easier for everyone. It’s about enabling rapid development, so we always try and find things that we can improve very quickly. One of the mottos we work by is to disagree and commit, which means that even if we disagree about the way something is delivered, we will commit to doing it that way, but review it in four weeks and see if it needs to change.  The other thing we always have is that it’s better to start than to finish. We used to take months to make decisions on some things, whereas now we make decisions very rapidly with these sprints. Getting it 80% right is far better than delaying a decision to try to get the 100% solution.  It’s a very valuable strategy, and we’re happy to share it with others either through direct contact in workshops or our webinars.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that are most prevalent for you as a leader at the moment? We’re currently growing, so we’ve set up a management team and brought in a Managing Director, and the biggest challenge there is instilling the same management philosophy the company has always had down a level, as well as trying to maintain our company culture within that and take into account people’s personalities. We’ve also been going through the process of changing the company to remove me from more of the day-to-day operations but ensure that the leadership structure is still there, and that has been a challenge as well. I suppose what I’ve learned is that it’s important to utilize support networks, which are much

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Speaking with Hannah Reid about developing a career in HR Leadership

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“If you can, find a mentor to support you. 9 times out of 10, the calls you make will be right, but it’s good to know for sure that you’re on the right track. Confidence is king in a lot of HR Leadership, and it will prepare you to move onto whatever your next challenge may be.” – Hannah Reid, Senior HR Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Gartner, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership. As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Hannah Reid at Gartner, who began her career as a Personnel Officer at the Employment Tribunals Office before moving to the City of London Police in 2006 to work as an HR Manager, later ascending the ranks to Head of HR. In 2014, Hannah joined the team at Allianz Insurance to work as a Regional HR Account Manager, moving to a role as Regional Head of Human Capital for the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Nordics at Oliver Wyman in May 2016. In April 2019, Hannah transitioned to her current role as Senior HR Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Gartner. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I originally studied Journalism at university, but after a long placement year as part of my studies, I realised that I wanted to work with people and build relationships with them rather than stay in the siloed environment of journalism. Because of that, I started looking for HR roles after I graduated, and came across a position within the Employment Tribunals Service. I went for it, got the job, and haven’t looked back since. I think that what made HR stick for me was the diversity. I liked journalism because I enjoyed being able to have an influence and bring people together, and I think that HR has lots of synergies with that. In that, I found that I was able to develop content that followed on from legislation and had a massive impact on people. As far as a foundation in HR goes, seeing legislation at work, being allowed to sit in the room with Chairman and Lay members as they made their judgements taught me how it all came together at the same time giving me the opportunity to work as a generalist travelling across the country. When tribunals moved from being under the Department of Trade and Industry to the Department of Constitutional Affairs, it triggered a really interesting change programme that I’m glad I got to be a part of, but also severely limited the autonomy of my role, so I decided it was time to move on shortly afterwards. My time with the City of London Police is where the bulk of my career took shape. It solidified my passion for HR, and I found that I was able to develop myself as a practitioner whilst getting the qualifications I hadn’t felt ready to do at the Tribunals —my FCIPD, a postgraduate diploma in Human Resource Management, and a Masters in Employee Relations. My studies focused on the lack of representation of Black and Minority Ethnic people in the Police, which led me to work with the Home Office and the  Association of Chief Police Officers lead for Race and Equality as well as the National Black Police Association. That was one example of many that helped me understand my influences and where I wanted my career to go. Although at that time they were struggling with being branded as institutionally racist, as a Black woman, that wasn’t my experience of the Police at all. It was an incredibly supportive environment; I was able to shape and influence the experience of others by being invited to have a seat at the table with the most senior Officers. It also shaped and drove my own  career, which turned out to be less about traditional HR and more varied in what I was delivering. Eight years might be considered a long tenure for someone so junior in their career, but working with the City of London Police was a constantly evolving picture. I was learning and learning, and it was really challenging at times, but it gave me so much opportunity that I wouldn’t change it for anything. I was given so much exposure as a HR Manager there that the progression to Head of HR was almost natural, but it would not have happened if I had not have proved my capability and had the support of senior leaders. No amount of deputising could have prepared me for the role, and I think that goes for any job. You might see elements that you think you can do from the outside looking in, but once you occupy the seat, you see the demands of the job in a very different way. Transitioning into that higher leadership role taught me a lot that has helped me lead ever since—I learned how to integrate change projects we’d done in the past to help us improve the ones we undertook in the present, as well as the true importance of leveraging my team to help us achieve our goals. I had the support of some amazing leaders who believed in me and gave me the confidence to be successful. Around the time I finished a large restructuring project resulting from the Government’s comprehensive spending review, I spoke to my manager about what was next for me as I was under 30 and knew I would not spend another 8 years at the Police. I was given some other great projects to lead and she then left to work for Allianz, and a year later, she called me to see if I was still thinking of leaving and recommended some vacancies in Allianz. I trusted her opinion and really

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Help your team thrive in the new normal

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This is a time of extraordinary change and uncertainty for small businesses—and their employees. That’s why Engagement Multiplier has created a new tool to help business leaders quickly understand how their teams are adjusting to working remotely, and what adjustments need to be made to help employees stay connected and productive.  You’re resilient. Make proactive changes to strengthen your business today—and for the future. Get started here

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Climbing the ladder of HR Leadership

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“Our commodity is humans. We’re not dealing with making a product, so we have to be flexible in our approach to work in a way that technology can’t be.” – Ian Stilgoe, Talent Acquisition Manager for the North Europe region at 3M, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.   As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Ian Stilgoe at 3M, who began his career in High Street Recruitment before embarking on a role as 3M European Program Manager under Volt Consulting Group and later 3M UK itself, later moving on to become Talent Acquisition and Human Resource Manager for 3M UK. In early 2019, Ian transitioned to his current role as Talent Acquisition Manager for the North Europe Region of 3M’s global operations. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I started my career in Recruitment, as many of my colleagues and my peers did. I worked my way through the management chain with some large recruitment companies, but ultimately I felt that my key attributes and strengths lay within the customer delivery side rather than new business development, which tended to be a key theme of Recruitment at the time. That led me to look into a role with Volt Consulting Group at 3M UK to manage permanent Sales and Marketing recruitment and a portion of contingent worker recruitment. I was successful in that, and was leading a team of seven Volt employees to manage the account across Europe when I was approached by 3M to head up Talent Acquisition after the decision was made to bring recruitment into in-house operations. Initially, I embarked on a career in the Recruitment industry because I could see that it was a lucrative industry that meshed well with my personality traits and strengths. I stuck with it because even though it was hard work across long hours, it was exciting, rewarding, diverse, and I loved working with a young group of people who were all driven by their desire to be successful. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the sector? The first one within Talent Acquisition specifically at the moment is the war for talent. It’s extremely competitive, and 3M only want to hire the best, so on top of that, our recruitment process is very stringent. Attracting and hiring the right people for the role can be very challenging. Another key theme is keeping up with ever-changing technology in a fast-paced environment, and I think that’s both in terms of ensuring we have the right technology to attract the right people for us, and ensuring we as recruitment professionals in operational roles can use that technology as effectively as possible. Navigating things like candidate pooling and applicant tracking software can be a minefield as there’s so many options out there, and having the time, headspace, and experience to understand what the best tool for you to use at any given time isn’t always easy. It’s important to be able to focus on a select number of systems at a time to make sure our time is productive.  At 3M Diversity & Inclusion are essential to innovation, we seek and value differences in people and our recruitment processes are aligned to support this. As an equal opportunity employer is important that we tackle the challenge of ensuring our candidate attraction strategy supports our D&I targets. We are constantly looking at ways to improve the way we reach out to our target candidate audience.  The final challenge, for me, is that across the industry, we’re seeing team sizes reducing but workload expanding. We’re increasingly being expected to do more with less—to continue to work on significant projects and perform operationally as we did before, even though our teams might be half the size now. You can implement all the technology in the world to try and ease the strain of that reduction, but ultimately there is still a huge amount of human input needed in the recruitment process, even down to the basic elements like orchestrating interviews and dealing with people on a daily basis. Our commodity is humans. We’re not dealing with making a product, so we have to be flexible in our approach to work in a way that technology can’t be. 3M are definitely supporting that, but the world of recruitment isn’t easy. What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their career? I would strongly recommend considering where your strengths are to govern where you fall, both in HR more generally and Recruitment specifically.  Recruitment organisations have evolved a lot over the years, but more traditional agencies are still providing a service to organisations that use mass recruitment. Their work may not be the most skilled practice out there, but if you’re just starting out in Recruitment, they can provide a good introduction to the key elements of good recruitment practice. From there, you have professional recruiters who’s approach may be to focus on a certain industry or senior level hires, and experiencing that is incredibly useful when helping you facilitate a career in recruitment. I think it’s important to be aware of the fact that Recruitment isn’t as simple as taking a vacancy and matching candidates to it; the reality is very different. If you can consider your strengths and your expectations for a role versus what you’ll actually be doing within that role, you’re more likely to see success rather than fall by the wayside. The third element of a Recruitment role alongside understanding the role and the sales aspects is where your people skills come in through matching up your requirements and candidates with the role itself, but you will start to develop these skills naturally through your professional development.   Talent

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Toby Hough speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership

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“To be the best HR Leader you can, you have to be able to build a multi-skilled team that sets you up for achieving your goals and recognises the value of both newcomers with wider business experience and those with hardened HR experience as well.” – Toby Hough, Director of People and Culture at hiber speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.   As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Toby Hough at hiber, who began his career with internships in Marketing and Communications at Saudi Hollandi Capital and as a Sovereign Wealth Fund Analyst at Robeco before moving to Deloitte to work as a Consulting Analyst; taking on subsequent roles as Management Consultant and later Senior Management Consultant within the company. In 2013, Toby joined the team at Medallia as a Senior Analyst for Professional Services, later ascending the ranks to Manager for Professional Services, followed by a 17-month tenure as Senior Manager before he became the company’s Head of People and Culture for Europe. In May 2018, Toby transitioned to his current role at hiber. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? The shift into HR happened while I was working at a customer experience software company called Medallia, following a three-and-a-half-year term in Consulting at Deloitte. From day one, I was incredibly struck by Medallia’s approach to People and Culture and HR. At that point in my career, I had never come across an organisation that placed so much value on having a well-defined values-based culture.  Medallia had top-quality People and Culture team members wired in across the business to be strategic and pastoral partners, and they were always seeking out views and opinions on how the business was evolving. The leader of the People and Culture function was as visible a strategic leader as anybody else, and that was one of the reasons why I held that team in great esteem. The company carried out very in-depth cultural onboarding with everybody who joined. As the business grew, the onboarding programme leader decided it was worth having facilitators for cultural onboarding in all the different regions we covered. Having been struck by how good my onboarding was a few years before, I applied to be a facilitator for Europe alongside my main role. That experience was a real turning point for me; I absolutely loved it, and was buzzing to do more. At that time, I was running a team of five or six Project Managers and dealing with a lot of pastoral and career development components in my main role; and I also spent a year helping to get an office set up in Paris, working with the team there to establish the culture from grassroots. As a result, alongside the facilitator role, I had HR experience without working in HR. Eventually, the outgoing Head of People and Culture for Europe asked me to consider applying for her role. I was hesitant at first, but with some guidance a mentor in the Learning and Development team, I undertook some self-reflection into the kind of work I enjoyed most and what energized me. All the signs pointed to the HR suite, so I took the plunge. The role was a total baptism of fire, but I was being challenged in ways a lot of outsiders to HR never realise you’re challenged, and I loved that. I loved how difficult the problems were across employee relations, design, and the technical aspect, as well as how directly linked they were to strategy. I knew at that point that HR was the place for me. Because I loved my People and Culture role at Medallia so much, my transition into hiber almost took me by surprise. I was approached by a friend who told me they knew a founder-CEO who was keen to create a top-class culture and HR setup in his startup, having learned the importance of this in an earlier venture. They asked if I would meet with him. I met Kilian, the CEO of hiber, a few times over the course of the next few months, and we started sketching up plans for implementation. In January 2018, Kilian secured investment funding to create a management position in the People and Culture space. He offered me the opportunity to join the founding management team of his start-up, and I recognized how rare such an opportunity was. I knew we had a chance to trailblaze—to influence other organisations to bring People and Culture in at the start rather than when a workforce hits 50+, and that was hugely exciting. I felt hiber had great potential to grow and adopt a different approach to building an organisation, so I agreed. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? Where hiber are forming as a business, my experience with them has been very different to coming into an established HR role, and has presented some unique challenges. In our early days as a start-up with no brand, recruitment was a real challenge, especially given the fact that I had been fairly hands-off in terms of recruitment at Medallia. Nevertheless, I knew hiber needed me to roll up my sleeves and learn what it was like to recruit, so I did. Initially, I was ashamed of spending money to secure agency support with the process, but Kilian was very passionate about getting talented people on board who could not only do their jobs well then, but continue to do so as the business expanded. Ultimately, I had to tackle my misconceptions and invest in building good strategic relationships with agencies. I see a reluctance to do so across HR that I think boils down to a stigma around agency spend and not seeing it as investment, but our CEO understands

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