How to succeed in HR

Hilary Dempsey shares her insights to help you succeed in HR.  Hillary worked in recruitment and HR in large companies like Coca Cola and Google as well as small companies and startups. 

We talk about:

• The top skills for HR executives
• How to build relationships with different teams
• How to make HR a valued assed instead of box-ticking
• The number one motivator for employees
• Good questions to ask in interview
• What small companies can learn from the recruitment in large companies

Transcript

0:00:07.1 Marie Ryan: Welcome to Hiring Talent. I'm your host, Marie Ryan. In this podcast, CEOs, HR managers and recruiters share their insights to help you find talented employees. In this episode, Hilary Dempsey shares her insights to help you succeed in HR. Hilary worked in recruitment, in HR, in large companies like Coca-Cola and Google, as well as small companies and startups. We talk about the top skills needed for HR executives, how to build cross-functional relationships, and what smaller companies can learn from larger companies when recruiting. Why did you choose to work in HR?

0:00:53.9 Hilary Dempsey: I would say HR chose me more than I chose HR originally. I suppose I started my career in recruitment and went into a small growing IT company to help with recruitment at exactly the wrong time from a recruitment perspective in 2008, and the economy took a bit of a downturn, but I loved it there, and I loved the people. As other HR things came up, I took them on, and it just grew from there, and I stayed in HR 'cause I really like it.

0:01:27.4 Marie: Great. What do you like about working in HR?

0:01:33.3 Hilary: I like the people aspect, more specifically that it's different every day because you just never know what might happen, so there's so much involved, recruitment, performance management, coaching, mentoring. There's just a variety of different things, and I think that's probably the most exciting for me because it's never dull. One day is never the same as the other day.

0:02:00.7 Marie: Yeah, that's one thing that's always intrigued me about HR, that you get to work with lots of different hiring managers in different departments. So you get to build up your working knowledge of all those areas. I'm not saying that if you speak to the accountants you're by de facto an accountant or an engineer or anything. But it's really nice to live different lives through all these different people and find out what really interests them, so yeah, it's a fairly dynamic area to be in.

0:02:28.7 Hilary: Absolutely. Absolutely.

0:02:31.4 Marie: What do you most dislike about working in HR?

0:02:37.8 Hilary: I don't know if there's anything I specifically dislike. Some things are hard, for myself, it's sometimes hard to separate, I suppose, emotionally when things go wrong, sometimes there's difficult conversation that are never fun to either have, be a part of, or even things that are not difficult for me, seeing that they're difficult for somebody else. So I suppose one, having difficult conversations when you have to have them 'cause they're not nice to have, but more so seeing when people are upset or things not going the way that they hoped they went and having to work through that with people or helping them work through it.

0:03:16.3 Marie: What's the best thing you can do to handle your emotions in a difficult conversation?

0:03:22.7 Hilary: I think certainly if it's something that I know is going to happen is being prepared. So if I'm going into a conversation really being prepared before. So I know I can't control what happens, but trying to think through either with myself or with anyone else involved, what might come up and then try to have responses or thoughts of how that conversation could go in a variety of different ways. If it's something that comes to me that I'm not expecting, to not necessarily have a knee-jerk response to maybe take it away and think about it to ask if I can come back, to reflect on it before I come back with an answer. Because sometimes what I might think initially off the bat would be the right thing to do, when I look a little bit deeper, it might not be the right thing, or it might be an emotional response that I have or an emotional response that somebody sitting across from me has. So really just taking the time to think through and be as prepared as possible, really. And I suppose empathetic when I can be, so I'm not always gonna say something that somebody wants to hear, or they might not say something that I wanna hear. So really just trying to keep an open mind and a little bit putting myself in somebody else's shoes, in terms of a response as honestly and openly as possible.

0:04:43.4 Hilary: And it's perfectly acceptable to stop the conversation. So I've been... It's like, I do do it with my children as well, but I still... Even in a work situation going, "I'm gonna stop the conversation now because I don't think we're getting anywhere and let's talk again in an hour or tomorrow, or whenever is an appropriate time." Because sometimes there's no point continuing a conversation that's just not going to end, it might not end full stop, whether or not it ends well or not, I suppose is debatable. But there's no point when people are emotionally charged or somebody sitting across from me is quite upset or if I'm upset to continue a conversation, that's not going to be productive.

0:05:23.7 Marie: So I'm curious to hear what the biggest mistake is that you made early in your career?

0:05:31.4 Hilary: I don't know, I'm kind of happy with how my career went, I'd say maybe regrets, I think maybe taking bigger projects at times when I thought I wasn't able to, when I could have. So I probably could have taken more stuff on earlier in my career than I did because I was either scared or I thought I wouldn't be able to do it. So I think those are some of them. If I was giving advice to my younger self or to anyone now, I would be like, just... You can do it, just take it on and learn as you go, because if obviously somebody has the confidence to offer to you, you obviously have the capabilities. And I spend lots of my time again, saying to my... I have two teenage girls, so saying to them, "You can do anything you set your mind to." You can learn to do it, you can look up how to do it, you can have a mentor to help you do it. So possibly taking on bigger roles or bigger projects early in my career when I was maybe a little bit timid and didn't have as maybe a big of a voice or as much confidence at the time.

0:06:37.3 Marie: Yeah, and what do you think is the number one skill for people who work in HR?

0:06:44.4 Hilary: I think relationship building. I know you spoke about hiring managers before, but I suppose it's really company-wide. For myself in a role as a one-person HR Department, it's relationship building across the whole organization. So managers, employees, anyone could come to me with almost anything really. So I think building those relationships so that people have the trust in me to come to me with whatever they might want to discuss, or have a question about, or need advice on, and then really delivering on what you say you're going to do. So I think honesty, trustworthiness, and relationship building. That's really three, not one. But if I have to pick one, relationship building.

0:07:28.1 Marie: Yeah, definitely. And when you're a one-person team in a company, whether it's large or small, it can be harder to develop those relationships. So how did you go about building relationships across different departments in the various places that you've worked in? Is there a magic formula that you can share?

0:07:49.8 Hilary: I don't know if there's a magic formula, but in the last three companies, which have been smaller, I have spoken to every single person, kind of, in my first... The first few months. Started with the management team to understand their roles and their departments. So from a business perspective, what is the company doing, what is your role, what are your team's role? And then meeting with people individually as well. So just like a quick, "What's your role?" "How long have you been here?" "What did you do before?" "What do you like about working here?" "What kind of things do you find frustrating?" In terms of just myself, as I've started to learn, I also, not right now because I'm working remotely, but make it a point of sitting in the canteen and having my lunch, and chatting with people, going to company events when they happen. Because if I just appear every once in a while, people aren't going to feel as open to chat with me. So kind of having those water-cooler chats, just to kinda get to know people, and what they're doing, and how things are going.

0:08:58.8 Hilary: I like chatting, so HR is good for me in that perspective, but kind of really getting to know people and the people will feel comfortable talking to me. In my current role, I was lucky to come in on the back end of an employee survey as well, which made it a little bit easier to have those chats with people, and to develop a plan, not only from the employee survey, but from the discussions with, what actions we're going to take as a company to keep doing the good things that we're doing, and improve on the things that we needed to improve on. So that's helped build trust straight off the bat as we started to implement some of those things as well.

0:09:36.8 Marie: How do HR professionals turn HR into a valued asset for the company rather than a box-ticking exercise?

0:09:44.9 Hilary: I think getting involved in as much as possible. And I don't mean involved in everything, but to really understand the business so that you can add value. So sitting in on the management meetings. So I'm lucky that I'm part of the management team, and have been for the last couple of companies that I've been in. But I suppose being able to contribute to that, and you can't unless you understand the business. So understanding what goes on in the departments, helping with the day-to-day culture, helping understand what staff is looking for as well. And then likewise, what's management looking for, and be able to relay that back to the staff as well. So it's kind of a balancing act. So even when staff talks about management, I'm part of that. But then I feel they're talking to me about it in a way to bring staff back to the management, almost as a spokesperson. So it's like a weird balancing act. But again, the management team would come to me for advice as well. So I feel like I'm not making loads of decisions in the role as an HR person, more so than mentoring and advising on what might be a good way to do, what might be a better way, what might be a risk, and how we can address those.

0:11:00.8 Marie: How do you maintain and expand the company culture when a company is growing quickly?

0:11:06.3 Hilary: Well, the company that I'm currently working for is well established. It's been around for a long time. So it's really about maintaining and changing the culture as needed, which has definitely been done. So from a financial services perspective, and at Credit Union, it's really a lot of, not just internally, but externally, kind of myth-busting to what people think of a Credit Union. And us moving forward with the times, getting more in-line with technology, more in-line with what our members want. And staff, I suppose, moving forward with that, so without losing the essence of the Credit Union, which is our member experience, and how we treat our customers, and customers wanting to talk to people. So that's... I suppose, that's kind of a different process, and harder to change because it's not new, but slowly doing that.

0:12:00.9 Hilary: So to answer your question, with a faster growing company it's really acting in the way we want people to act. So hiring people with the right kind of, not just skills, but also attitude, communication skills, willingness to learn, adaptability. So I think it's really coming in at the ground when we're looking to hire people. So it's thinking a little bit outside of the box in terms of, "We need someone with exactly these skills." The skills are important, but I suppose the basics of the skills, to an extent, can be taught. We want the people that are gonna grow with the company. And I suppose that goes for an established company adding new people. And I think it starts with the hiring process, and then getting everybody on board, making sure people understand why we're doing what we're doing, why are we making the changes that we are changing... Why we're making the changes that we are, from a business perspective. And I think if everyone sees that vision, for the most part, people get on board and then adapt.

0:13:04.9 Marie: I know you've worked with a lot of bigger companies like Coca-Cola and Google, as well as smaller companies like CU. Is there anything that smaller companies can learn from the hiring process in larger corporations?

0:13:19.0 Hilary: I think so, yeah. So the Coca-Cola company and Google as well is where I gained most of my initial recruitment experience, and I think a really robust... And I don't mean robust, like loads and loads of interviews, but robust in terms of understanding what people are interviewing for and keeping the process quite tight in terms of that. So by tight I mean interviewers know how to interview, we know what we're looking for in candidates. And then we're making fair selection processes and moving through the process as quickly as possible so that everyone's being treated fairly. Anyone that does an interview is interviewing in a similar way against the right skills, obviously, and then candidates have a good experience and it's easy for people to understand the process and it's fair, and we tend to make good hiring decisions based on that.

0:14:12.6 Marie: We all know it's a difficult market at the moment in terms of recruitment, how do you find talent in a talent crunch?

0:14:20.8 Hilary: We struggle like everybody else. I think we look for referrals all the time, where we get really good candidates from referrals. I know HireHive actually has a really good referral system within there that helps you do that easily, but asking people for referrals, remembering who we've talked to before, because often when you interview... When we go through a whole recruitment process and you've narrowed it down to maybe three or four candidates, there could be two that you'd almost flip a coin to decide. So when you don't hire one, who's that person, what are you doing with them when they don't get hired that time? Are we going back and asking them a second time? Which we do do. I think even... We don't hold off our recruitment process either. Even right now, at the end of the summer, a lot of companies might say, "Oh, I'm not gonna bother looking 'cause everyone's on their holidays." Or as you get close to the end of the year, people might say same. So when we need somebody, we start looking back up the process to take into account how long it might take, and then I suppose not rush through it, so we'd wait till we have the right person to make an offer on a role as well.

0:15:37.8 Marie: What are the key motivators for employees?

0:15:41.4 Hilary: There's probably a combination of things, and actually, it's very interesting where I work now because there's... We've employees that have been there like brand new up to employees that have been there over 20 years, and I've never worked anywhere like that. Well, I did early in my career, but for the past 20 years, I hadn't worked anywhere like that. So it's different, probably for all of the staff, but I think the people that they work with is a massive motivator, so their managers, their teammates, the people that come into the door in terms of liking what they do, believing in what they do, and the people that they're working with. So when people... When I do surveys currently, internally, and even when people are leaving, the number one people, the number... Sorry, the number one thing that people say that they like best about the company is the people that they're working with, which is fantastic.

0:16:38.2 Hilary: So I suspect if they stopped working with the people they worked with, we might have a few more leavers, so that's a big one. And then career development or development within the roles. And again, not for everybody in the company, but you see some people move quite quickly through. So being able to keep people motivated, again, in a smaller organization it's hard, so you have to be a little bit more creative in what that development looks like. And it might not mean a higher level role, but maybe a sabbatical into a different department or a special project that you want someone to work on. So I think those are the two big ones at least.

0:17:14.1 Marie: In an interview, what's the number one quality you look for in candidates?

0:17:19.8 Hilary: I think communication. I think for all the roles that I've been in, adaptability and communication because things change so frequently, even in maybe the Credit Union where you think it'd be less changeable, it's actually been quite changeable. And I think if the year and a half has taught us anything, it's that we all have to be adaptable. So I think it's really people's willingness to learn and adapt, they don't have to be... Not crazy stuff that's so changeable, but just open enough to learn something new, a different way to do things. And then really communicating, not just with the members, but with each other because that's the bulk of our role, not just mine as an HR person, but the managers have to communicate with their teams, they have to communicate with each other. Team members have to communicate with each other, they have to communicate with the customers, good news, bad news, information, etcetera.

0:18:19.2 Marie: How do you assess communication skills and adaptability in an interview? Are there any specific go-to questions that you typically ask?

0:18:28.9 Hilary: I think with adapt... So for adaptability, I would ask, "Tell me about a change in your last company, what happened, why did it change, how did you react? What happened?" Those type of things. I like to ask, "Tell me something new that you've learned in the last year." 'Cause that would show change and adaptability, willingness to learn. Communication comes across in all of those, but I do ask about customer experiences. Or, "Tell me about a difficult message you had to communicate." or, "Tell me an exciting message you had the chance to communicate, and how did you communicate that? What happened?" Pretty much any question you ask, certainly when I'm doing phone screens, we can assess communication in terms of clarity of the message, what was said, etcetera.

0:19:26.2 Marie: Okay, great. And finally, what's your favorite question to ask in interviews?

0:19:32.7 Hilary: Favorite question to ask in an interview is, Tell me the last thing you learned, full stop. And that way, I can understand if a candidate is talking about something they learned in the workplace or personally, to me it doesn't matter which one it was. It's really again about the willingness to learn something new, how they go about it, which would also show their adaptability, their initiative, etcetera. So that would be my favorite question, I think.

0:20:00.7 Marie: Thanks a lot for your time today.

0:20:02.0 Hilary: Thank you. It was great talking to you.

0:20:04.3 Marie: Thanks for tuning into the Hiring Talent Podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want more content like this, be sure to subscribe and visit our site hirehive.com.