EP106: Omoda|Jaecoo Brasil - How to Leverage Cultural Fit in Interview

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Flávio Stanzani Tozetto of OMODA|JAECOO BRASIL. Welcome to the show, Flávio.

Flávio: Thanks for having me, Lydia. Happy to be here.

Expanding the Team and Prioritizing Employees’ Life Cycle

Lydia: So, Flávio, tell us about your journey in the people space so far. How has it been for you? What are some key takeaways that you've had? I mean, you've got an exciting role and we'll go into that. But so far, what's it like?

Flávio: Sure. So, it's been great for me as a person. I always loved dealing with people and their personalities. When I started working with HR, everything made sense. I understand that the HR department is as important as any business department, because people build and develop companies, and companies create products and solutions.

HR leaders must be able to define strategies that will better support business and their employees. If you don't have a clear people strategy, it doesn't matter how good your products are, you will struggle a lot.

Lydia: So, in your current role as Head of Human Resources and Corporate at OMODA|JAECOO, what are some key areas that you have prioritized so far? I understand that you joined the company sometime last year, right?

Flávio: Yes, correct. Right now, my main responsibilities as Head of HR and Corporate at Omoda Group Brazil are to develop and implement a robust and consistent plan to execute the company's objectives in the country. When we talk about HR, we are talking about people and culture. In a global company, in addition to the daily challenges, we also need to think about all the particularities of the organization's location, but always stay aligned with the global plans. So right now, we are currently developing our Brazilian team and expanding it according to the company's objectives and needs, selecting the headquarters that best fits the brand's positioning and also being close to the strategic partners for business. In addition to that, we are also developing a career plan that will better engage the team, and we're also doing a lot of benchmarking with the biggest organizations in Brazil.

So, moving away from the macro into some more corporate actions, I prioritize an employee's life cycle. From the moment we interview our candidates, who will eventually become our employees, to the moment when they have to go to the office to do their job, their experience should be flawless.

If we want our customers to have a good experience with our products, we should also make sure that our employees are having a good experience throughout their life cycle in Brazil. Other things that I prioritize a lot are fostering a good, trustful, and positive environment through transparency with leaders and their employees, as well as providing a good place where different cultures can coexist. You know, a win-win.

We have lots of nationalities working together here, and with the right leaders paying attention to how important it is to balance culture and ways of working, the final outcome could be really good. So, we are now in a situation where we are building everything from scratch; putting together all the strategy, considering past experiences, data, and benchmarking, so we can begin on the right foot.

Using Past Experience to Design Policies From Scratch

Lydia: There is a Chinese automotive brand coming to Brazil. As you mentioned earlier, it is in that building phase. So, what are some principles or fundamentals that you use towards building HR policies from scratch for a new automotive brand that's coming into Brazil, and who might be the key stakeholders in this?

Flávio: That's a great question. Well, I come from the tech industry and as we know, the tech industry is really mature when it comes to having a strategic HR, especially for me to compare with some traditional segments like the automotive industry.

So, the first thing I had to do when I started designing policies from scratch was to use my experience from companies I've worked with in the past and try to combine them together, considering our local automotive needs. I had to consider aspects like security, talent management, and compensation by talking to executive peers from the automotive industry and relying on their impressions about the things I was proposing.

That is something I believe every term leader should do, which is to lean on businesses to understand whether their policies and ideas make sense. Because at the end of the day, HR should support business, and it's responsible for eliminating any barriers that may arise and leaving the path open for employees to perform 100%.

Lydia: Now what are some key considerations, or maybe some factors that are unique to the Brazilian market that will possibly go back or influence the way that you design these new policies?

Flávio: I see a few things to consider. First, definitely, labor loss. I've worked for other markets in the past, in other countries. In Brazil, it stands out because we have a labor law full of peculiarities, not saying that it's good or bad, but the first thing I thought about when writing the policies was, “Which are the risks this policy would give me if we implement them?” That's a thought I had because I had to discard great ideas because of the potential risks we would face.

The second thing is that the Brazilian market for the automotive industry is really strong. We cannot find a country like Brazil that is able to sell more than 3 million cars per year. But that does not mean the automotive industry is mature in Brazil, from the HR perspective. It’s far from it actually. Sometimes the policies and ways of working, I was thinking were good, but the Brazilian market is not yet ready to have them, because we are a few steps behind. So building a plan, considering the Brazilian maturity, was also very important for designing policies.

Lydia: Now, in terms of what you mentioned earlier that you come from tech being quite progressive and quite forward in terms of HR policies and practices, and then into traditional industries such as automotive, what might be the differences and in what ways should a traditional industry, or some ways of working in HR in these industries, need to move forward?

Flávio: That’s another great question. So, I see there are a couple of ways to answer that; the business way and the corporate way. From the business side, everything in the automotive industry, which is part of a more traditional environment, is bigger. The numbers are bigger. Usually, in tech, you are working on something specific. You're going to develop a very specific solution for a certain type of situation, or you're going to develop a game. Whenever you are hiring people or recruiting people, usually, you're going to deal with pieces of the whole solution. So, the solution in tech is very far from the employee's side.

Sometimes the engagement of a tech employee is not that good because what he or she is doing, what that developer is doing, is very far from the final product. Meanwhile in the automotive industry, in the traditional segment, we have a product that you know exactly what it is and the engagement of the employee is much better. Even if the employee is tired, they can see and feel the product. So, from the tech side, I used to see that we lacked a lot of engagement in certain areas, but in the automotive industry, not really—everyone is more engaged. So, that is the business side.

Another thing about business is that, as I said, our numbers are very big. We are always dealing with millions and billions. We are dealing with influencers and the press. In the tech industry, that happens, but not that often, and also in a smaller proportion. Let's say that the exposure is smaller.

From the corporate side, I understand that the culture segment in tech is way better than the culture segment in the automotive industry. Because, again, something I see a lot in the tech industry, that the tech industry is doing, is promoting the values of the companies and any initiatives that will make the employee feel welcome, and feel more of a sense of belonging to the company's values, which does not happen quite often in the automotive industry.

That is why I'm trying to propose those things in the car segment much more often. So, there are a lot of situations where they could hold those examples because I think they really fit what you asked for.

Getting the Top Talent with the Right Skillsets

Lydia: Building a team from the ground up usually, by default, requires attracting the right kind of talent.

So, in terms of identifying the right skills, or the specific types of skills that you need for success, how do you go about doing it at this phase?

Flávio: Building scorecards with predefined questions and expected answers from a screening perspective is extremely important. Because we will be able to focus on what we want to find in candidates. But as important as having search scorecards is to invest in the first 20 minutes of the initial interview by explaining everything to the candidates so then they know exactly what they will be facing.

That methodology, if I could comment on all sorts as a screening parameter because once we expose the real challenge to candidates, they will also have the opportunity to evaluate if the opportunity makes sense to them or not. I see a lot of interviewers, recruiters, and also hiring managers who are not investing their first interview minutes in explaining everything to the candidates, and that's not good. It creates an uncertain mindset in front of the candidate, especially with the company scaling up like ours right now.

If you have a formatted scorecard, and we invest a few minutes by explaining the currency scenario, the challenges, all the plans, and how the candidate would fit in the organization, the chances to find the people who know how to do the job and want to be part of what is being offered are extremely high.

Lydia: Now, that culture point, the second point that you brought up, wanting to be part of that success, that culture element. Is there a best practice that you tend to fall back on when it comes to identifying the right person for the culture?

Flávio: Yes, there is actually myself. I am one of the key stakeholders who also performed interviews of new joiners and in my conversations with leaders, especially with leaders. Because right now we are hiring by looking for the leadership team first, and then going to the operational side every time I'm going to be talking to them.

I also have these scorecards that I just told you, but my focus is on culture. The culture part that I'm focused on requires a certain type of skills that go to our core values. So in my conversation with them, I do have specific questions with expected answers that I want to hear from candidates in which they are going to try to give their very best to me, and then I could understand what they really are to me correspond to the values that our company has. It's funny because our rate of declining candidates has much more with culture than with tech abilities. So, that shows how important it is the core culture values in our company whenever we are assessing candidates.

“The Future of TA Will be Purely Based on Interviewing”

Lydia: I'm going back to assessing a great point there. How does recruitment technology, or even data play a role in this phase of planning and setting up the foundations for operations?

Flávio: As we are still scaling, there are some things that are not fully done yet, but the strategy is built right. We are a data-driven company, so I believe that companies that are not working at the forefront of technology today, with it as one of their main allies, may not succeed in the near future, and certainly, that applies to the HR area.

So, technology should be a great ally for everything that we do in HR, especially with systems like ATS and HRMS. However, we must use them wisely. We need to get these numbers from the tools, turn them into insights, and then come up with actions and measure those actions using KPIs. I also see that AI will help us a lot to automate many of the tasks.

So, the future of HR, from my perspective, will be based on the human aspect, which is something that cannot be done by an algorithm. Things like writing job descriptions and posting jobs are becoming more and more driven by AI. So, we could start using these technologies as a way to improve our quality and to begin focusing even more on what's really important, which is dealing with people.

I see that the role of standardization has evolved a lot throughout the years. Before, we used to have a very fragmented team in which different people dealt with pieces of the Talent Acquisition cycle. They were doing something extremely specific for that piece of the Talent Acquisition process. So, one person was in charge of sourcing, another person was in charge of screening, and another person was in charge of interviewing and offering. With the advent of technology, I saw that everyone started to do more tasks. That is extremely important because, by having more tools, people were able to understand that they could do more with the help of technology.

Now, the way everything is moving forward, I see that the major aspect of Talent Acquisition will be purely based on interviewing. You can post a job without having a human factor in it. You can write a decent job description without having to review everything with the hiring manager. But interviewing people is a different story because, again, there is the human element that is more important. I'm used to saying that a good recruiter is someone who knows how to hire and who to hire, but a good recruiter is also someone who knows when a person is not a good fit. That human aspect, the human behavior—technology cannot play a role in that. So, I see that the advent of technology has given us a lot of different tools to deal with, and the future of TA will be purely based on interviewing.

Lydia: And finally, Flávio, what is your favorite or most memorable recruitment story?

Flávio: I spent almost one and a half years of my life managing a Talent Acquisition team in Mexico. I'm from Brazil, born and raised, but I have a deep appreciation for Mexico. I miss my Mexican friends, but I remember that we were having a party after work. We have just launched a very specific product. So, we were discussing, leading, and just having a party. Then I started to engage with another employee that I got to know better at the party.

After a whole night of discussing and talking about business trends, the market, and everything, he goes and says something like, "The HR guy that hired me was really good because I felt comfortable. I came from Peru to Mexico, and here I am, two years later." I was like, "What is your name?" And then he gave his name. I have a very good memory for names, and I was like, "I hired you." And he was like, "Really, was it you?" So that was extremely interesting.

We are recruiting people all day, for months, and years, and sometimes we might not realize how impactful our job is. We are changing people's lives every single day, and I changed that guy's life. We were discussing a few years after he was hired, and he was saying good things about me. I didn't even know that I had hired him. So, I think that story is very special.

Lydia: Yes, that's fun and amusing, and it's really rewarding when you're talking about it. It's like having a direct or indirect testimonial coming at you, and you're thinking it's someone else, and then you see the results of your work. So, I think that's a great story. Thank you so much, Flavio, for your time and these great insights. I wish you all the best in your efforts to build the function there.

For those who are listening in and who want to connect with you and maybe pick up the conversation later, where's the best place to connect with you?

Flávio: Sure. Thanks for having me, Lydia. It's been a pleasure sharing this personal and professional thoughts with you. So the audience can reach me through my LinkedIn page. You could type my name, OMODA|JAECOO on LinkedIn. For sure, there’s going to be one of the few profiles that pops out over there, because we are still a small company and we're still a small team, but feel free to drop me a message and connect over there.

Lydia: Thanks again, Flávio. We have been in conversation with Flávio Stanzani Tozetto of OMODA|JAECOO Brasil. Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.