With the increase in remote work, in what ways is HPE able to fill job openings by ignoring regions or borders because employees no longer have to come into the office? "[The pandemic and remote work] made my job so much easier because there were no parameters around location. The only hiccup was sometimes time zones with meetings. So, if we hire someone who works in Singapore and your client is in the US, that can be tricky. From a recruiting aspect, man, those lack of borders were like Christmas for us in recruiting. And even as we’re getting back to a hybrid way of recruiting, we still have some limitless borders. We also have positions that are 100% in the office — client based — but we also have the ones that are edge. That remote way of working – as a talent acquisition] leader, if I could convince every company to stay remote, I would, because it makes recruiting so much easier.
"What’s interesting is we have a new class of new graduates that have just joined our organization. We have 67 of them in a room. Half of them are in the office; half of them are remote. And we asked them about their experience — us flying them all to Houston, then meeting people in person; they actually don’t want to be remote. Eighty-five percent of them wanted to be in the office every day. They want to be able to learn. They want to have water cooler chats, because they’re new in their career. So, it’s those different profiles and different mentality. You and I are later on in our careers, and we’ve been there and done that. We’re self-sufficient. But they need that peer partnership."
What advice would you give to HR offices in attracting and retaining talent, particularly IT talent in a time when unemployment is virtually non-existent? "I would say you have to hear the voice of your workforce. If you’re not hearing that, and more specifically tech talent in this day and age in HR, you are at a humongous miss. Let them tell you what works for them and what doesn’t. Learn from that and make changes. We run our “Voice of the Workforce” survey every single year. Typically, other companies do that every other year, sometimes even once every five years. We run it every single year because of the geopolitical issues in the market, because of COVID and post-COVID. There are so many different moving parts that can influence what their thoughts are. Then try to deliver a product, because that’s what we have — a product called — that’s flexible enough that they can see themselves here.
"Once I get them in, I have to deliver them a career path, and we’ve embedded “My Success Plan” conversations that you have to have with your team six times a year. So, at all times you know where your career is headed, where you stand with your current manager, and then what skillsets you can continue to grow in the organization."
Upskilling and reskilling — how important is that during this time of low unemployment and limited prospects? "Top five from an importance perspective. Even now, we’re performing while we’re transforming. So, we’re identifying skill sets we didn’t have in the organization six years ago. During COVID, it was hard to go out into the market and get all those skill sets. So, how do we upscale our current team members and what are the skills they need to get? Learning and development is top of mind and you have to have a phenomenal portfolio of technical paths, technical skill sets, how we deliver certifications and other opportunities. Even from a retention perspective, if I can be here and learn and advance my knowledge base, I don’t have to go to another company to do that."
Has HPE actively been recruiting people with AI skills? If so what are some of those key AI skills? "We actually acquired a whole company called Determined AI. So, we took the stance of acquisition and recruiting. We are delivering AI from a client perspective with regard to our enterprise and edge-to-cloud offerings.
"It is something we have carved out as a niche, obviously under our engineering umbrella. There are very few [AI skilled prospects], so what we’re doing is we’re beginning to partner with schools, ensuring going forward this is embedded in the curriculum, and helping them build this into their curriculum through our business leaders because going forward the number of cloud engineers is a very small circle. And let’s be real, the diversity within that circle is even smaller. So, as you want to grow talent here, we’re going to have to ensure the graduating classes will have this skill set. That’s where we’ve been focusing now."