EP111: Wise - How TA and Management Can Align on Skills

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 Gabriele Galassi from Wise. Great to have you with us, Gabriele.

Gabriele: Thank you for having me, and nice to meet you, Lydia.

Moving into the People Space

Lydia: Gabriele, tell us a little bit more about your background and your move into the people space. What's the real pull factor for you in this space?

Gabriele: So, I started my career in the television industry, and I was on the business side of things. But, when I got to manage a team and take leadership responsibilities, I realized that talent, growing talent, and enhancing performance was where my passion was.

I truly had a lot more fun enhancing my team. So, I thought I needed to turn this into a job. Like many, I started from where I had a lot of credit which was training people on the skills that I had acquired from my job.

I had a lot of street credit, I like to call it, but I also went back to university and started retraining in Organizational Psychology and then as a coaching psychologist. This was a very long journey that I did on the side. In terms of how I started, it was a training role within BBC Studios to start a sales academy. After that experience, I had my consultancy. When I finished my studies, I launched my consultancy, and I was independent for five years, working across so many different organizations in the space of talent development and talent acquisition as well.

I was a coach and a lecturer. I lectured at Kingston University and Birkbeck University in the UK on training and development, which is a very serious discipline within undergraduate and postgraduate courses in organizational psychology. So, it's like theories of learning, adult education, and things like that. That led me to where I am today at Wise.

Translating Academic Knowledge into Practical Applications in the Workplace

Lydia: So that academic, or rather, that teaching module that you do as a practice, how have you transferred that knowledge or applied that onto your role at Wise?

Gabriele: I think there's a huge challenge. There's been a huge challenge between academia and the world of practitioners. There's always research in Organizational Psychology, especially in the learning and development field. It's amazing. We have really robust studies around learning transfer, for example, like all of those predictors of successful learning, but we also have a lot of input on assessing the impact of learning, not to mention all the theories of instruction.

So, how do you put together a learning experience in order to be successful, in order for people to really learn what you want them to learn? Translating the academic experience into the job is, I think, incredibly easy. You just feel like you've got almost like an additional power with all that wealth of knowledge, and obviously, how to navigate it as well. Because research and academia can be incredibly difficult to navigate unless you're trained to recognize what is solid and what is not.

The other way around, perhaps, is as a lecturer, I've always been quite pragmatic. I think I found myself being called an academic at work; sometimes people call me Professor Gab at work, and in the academic world, as a lecturer, I was known as a practitioner. So, I've been sort of navigating the two worlds, sometimes with a bit of frustration because we wish people knew more on both sides. There's the frustration sometimes of having students being overly academic and telling them, "Hey, you're not going to last one day in an organization if you approach it this way." But then also on the other side, as practitioners, you wish they knew how to understand research a bit better.

Lydia: It's always about paving a new pathway, whether it's in academia, or bringing new ideas into both sides. I suppose that is where the real push happens, in terms of your role at Wise.

In this global role, you are a Global Head of People in Organizational Development, so what areas have you prioritized within Wise?

Gabriele: Yes, Wise solves a real-life problem, right? Each of us experiences it when we go abroad, and for this reason, we just look for people who think of customers first or are customer-obsessed, and we do the same for businesses across the world at the end of the day. Just like making money travel faster, more conveniently, ultimately free, and transparently. So, when you think about working within an organization like this, which is so mission-driven and so customer-focused, the way that you translate this into your people strategy is that you start with people first and foremost.

So, we're absolutely not the kind of HR operating from the ivory tower and pushing down frameworks. I think we hold our business stakeholders very accountable for being very relevant and demonstrating our impact all the time. Their experience of being a talent within Wise is where we start every time. We believe in designing all of our interventions not only with our customers in mind but with our customers present in the room. We even do planning together.

Lydia: When you say your customers are in the room, how does that work? I mean, what is the process behind that? Or is that, an ongoing thing? Or do you have that as a set or sort of a one-off focus group, for instance?

Gabriele: Yes, besides thinking and listening sessions, and co-creating workshops, I would say that that most of what my team does, from leadership development to company onboarding to even mandatory and compliance training; all starts from a room where we can sit with our business stakeholders and understand what it is that they're actually needing and what kind of input they can give to our work so that what we do is first and foremost relevant to them.

I think at the end of the day, evidence-based HR is, what everybody talks about, in my mind, 50% of the evidence you need to use is your business stakeholders' feedback.

There's data, of course, because sometimes you can see data patterns, and you can see insights in a way that business stakeholders cannot. So, you need to use data as well, and then obviously leaders' research, industry trends, or sort of market standards or market best practices. All of these things combined give you evidence-based practice, but for me, 50% of it comes from business stakeholders.

Moving Beyond Traditional HR Metrics to Measure Success

Lydia: In terms of this, these are great initiatives put in place, especially to understand real-time and very current expectations and goals within the business itself, coming from the stakeholders. So, what are your measures of success in these particular initiatives, for example?

Gabriele: Yes, beyond what I guess people like or don't like, which is the standard way in which we used to measure HR interventions, I think the essence of our relevance is the impact that we can have on the business. So, I'm proud of a lot of initiatives that we measure.

Something that comes to mind, for example, is the work that we do, both in Talent Acquisition and talent management together. It’s a joint effort that we do at Wise in the program that we call Wise Start.

The WiseStart is a program, I guess, like an umbrella term under which we put all the programs where we find, hire, and then develop early careers—early career newbies, graduates, apprentices, interns, but also people who want to change careers with internal academies, for example. So, that's one of the best examples of true, I guess, partnership and collaboration between Talent Acquisition and talent management.

Talking about how we measure things, for example, with this particular program and with a very central cohort of graduates that we hire every year, we've been able to demonstrate that, thanks to the accurate hiring and the development we put in place for these people, both from a learning point of view and a performance management point of view, we saved hours and hours of time for the team leads.

We did a lot of the guidance and mentoring ourselves with the newbies, but we also significantly contributed to their autonomy. The speed to being capable of executing certain tasks was a lot faster thanks to our intervention. So, thanks to the way that we hired, but also the way we accompanied these people in the first six months, their journey to autonomy was a lot faster than if we had just introduced them to the team like, "Here’s your graduates, and good luck," in a sense.

So, speeding up their journey to autonomy is an excellent measure. This is something that, for example, we propose to do for the way we do company onboarding as well. Company onboarding, from a talent agenda point of view, is so important, and usually, everybody loves it because it’s your first week of work. You’re getting pampered, you’re getting a lot of attention, maybe you get some swag, a free lunch, and you do some networking. You don’t know anyone, so people are usually excited by it. But then, what is the impact of what we're doing? How are we facilitating the introduction of these people into the organization? How successfully do we help them navigate the culture in the first few months?

And leadership development is the same. People love going on leadership development programs because they’re usually a milestone in the career of an individual. But then what we like to measure is, if we take a group of people that hasn’t attended our training for whatever reason and compare them to the same number of people that have gone through the training, can we demonstrate, six months down the line, that those people get much better feedback in terms of the quality of their leadership in our engagement survey?

We do measure these things, and we’re very proud of the results that we get. This is ultimately also how you want to communicate to the business because it immediately gives you that kind of relevance, authority, and gravitas to be in the room with them. You’re not just executing admin work; you’re actively contributing to the success of the organization.

Lydia: These are initiatives that work really well in terms of just making sure that people are on their own speed to autonomy, as you say. But are there any challenges to executing this on a global scale?

Gabriele: I think there are, of course, but it's about the scalability of what you do, and it's about always diversifying your talent agenda between some foundational work and some customized work. I have to say that, of course, I have to answer that, that are challenges, but there's also some design that goes into this.

So I think it depends. For example, if you have a well-distributed leadership community, and if you work well with your leaders, then you've solved 50% of the issue or 50% of the challenge. It also depends on how accurately they are distributed. So personally, one of the challenges that I have in my team—and we're a big team—but we don't have the same coverage necessarily everywhere. So, we need to make up for, for example, the lack of facilitators sometimes in certain locations over others.

But I think ultimately it's about how you design the team, and it's about how you design your regional presence. If you do that with talent practices in mind, then you're always going to make sure that there is always someone who is capable of carrying out all the initiatives.

But I would like to say that we've got it 100% right at the start. Because a program like that heavily depends also on regional configurations. So, for example, in the UK, you've got the apprenticeship scheme, and in any other geography, you don't necessarily have the same setup. In certain countries, there's a culture for early careers and graduate jobs. In others, it is not the same. The same applies to intent. So you need to consider those nuances as well.

Aligning Talent Management and Acquisition to Maximize Potential

Lydia: Now, going back to the collaboration that you talked about between talent management and Talent Acquisition. What are some challenges or maybe some barriers that recruiters or talent teams might face when it comes to assessing candidates to fit on a broader people strategy, for instance?

Gabriele: I think the biggest challenges for Talent Acquisition at the moment are around finding the right skills in the market. So literally, having available talent pools and, in those talent pools, being able to find the skills that you're looking for, and then process efficiency. So, like, how quickly you can turn around the process.

Then another big challenge is the technology challenge. It's an opportunity as well, right? But I think we're navigating a moment where it's confusing, and we're probably transitioning into a completely different dimension, but we still don't know precisely what that looks like.

But for me, the points of contact with the kind of job that I focus on, are more on the talent journey once we've acquired the talent, the main point of contact is around skills. So, around working on creating a common language when it comes to skills. This has been talked about forever, so this is another amazing example of what I was telling you earlier—academia being completely isolated from the practitioner world.

But there's so much talking right now about skill-based organizations and skill-based acquisition and development, etc. Organizational psychologists have been talking about this for decades, only they call them competencies, right? And now everybody calls them skills, and all of a sudden, it's this big revolution, but it's not really.

I think if talent, as a dimension, can align on what the right skills are for the jobs that you have in the organization, but especially for the jobs that you're going to have down the line, like in two years' time, then the collaboration between the two teams is exquisite because it can really maximize potential. Once you've defined what potential is for your organization.

But I wish—and I know that my colleague in talent acquisition feels the same—I wish that we could spend more and more time aligning on skills and sort of unifying the way that we look at it because there's so much consistency in this journey if only we find the right pegs to start doing the work together.

Lydia: Yes, and to your point on, identifying potential maybe two or three years down the line, and also identifying what potential looks like in terms of identifying a potential high performer, are there any components that go together in order to find out, “Okay, this might be the person that we would possibly be looking at.”

Let's say we're dealing with many uncertainties, how do you identify a high performer in that sense?

Gabriele: I think you must first decide what a high performer is. The truth is, a lot of talent teams and leaders accept this word at face value. But just like with constructs such as potential, for example, there is no one type of high performer. I’ve seen countless threads on LinkedIn of consultants shouting, “This is what a high performer is, this is what a high performer does.” And, I don't know, as a psychologist, I would warn people against anyone who claims to hold the truth about the definition of an individual. For me, it's a contradiction, even when that is just a professional persona.

So if you ask me, “What should you do?” I think you go back to the drawing board and observe talent within your organization. If you have intellectual honesty, you'll already know that it's a tentative area.

Because there’s so much to do in order to identify high performance and talent within the organization. You have to agree on so many things before you can say for sure, “These are our high performers.” You need a lot of alignment among functions, both at an organizational level and a technical level within the different departments.

But let's say if your talent agenda is clear, you can start by observing those who’ve had the most significant impact on the business, those who have been able to navigate challenges and consistently improve.

And I guess you can observe your low performers too, or if you can’t observe them, then maybe you can read their performance reviews and analyze what has gone wrong in their journey within the organization. With all of that knowledge, you can identify common themes and narratives, and with those observations, you can start building what a high-performing persona looks like.

You isolate competencies—so skills—but by that, we really mean knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and actual technical skills that define successful performance in your organization.

Then with that, you open another big chapter, which is, “So, how do I identify those narratives in a candidate?” Too often, we rely on interviews, and interviews for sure have validity and some ability to predict performance. But there’s so much more that could be done. Even within interviews, situational judgment questions seem to be more successful than other types of questions. Yet I still see a lot of organizations heavily insisting on interviewing based on their organizational values, which probably isn’t a very future-proof strategy.

There are many ways to assess, and there’s a lot of research on all these different assessment methods. But the truth is if you don't know what good looks like, and if you can't elaborate or describe what a high performer is in your organization, then even with the most advanced assessment tools, you're still going to fail.

Evaluating Potential and Performance in Complex Careers Beyond Tenure

Lydia: So, in terms of all these components and totally get into, I can see how so many factors can come into play when you need to identify what a high performer actually is and what potential truly means internally before you can look outside. But there's also, a question of does this tenure plays a part in this judgment. How long someone has worked in a role, or how many times they've shifted? There are so many discussions about this out there, with plenty of debates on whether or not a tenure, for instance, less than a year or two years of service is important. What is your opinion on this?

Gabriele: Well, it’s a complicated answer. As someone who has changed careers quite dramatically at some point in my life, and as someone who has gone from being a freelance consultant to being internal in an organization again, I loved having chances like this, and I am proof that non-standard careers can be successful. There are so many people out there who can demonstrate this.

I think it’s a very subjective decision because, at the end of the day, there are people who are obviously capable of performing in a role even if they don’t have enough years of experience or tenure in the role. Equally, there are people who have many years of tenure and still will not be able to perform at the next level for whatever reason.

What’s the game-changer here? I think it’s your ability to facilitate the process for this individual. If you hire someone who’s been in a role for a couple of years and you think it would take five years for someone to perform at the next level, but you still want to give this person a chance, you know you’re going to have to accompany this person in the first six months of their role. So, can you afford that? Do you have the time and the resources to do that?

But that’s why my discipline is so fascinating. We’re not operating with machines; we’re operating with human beings. And human beings—despite the whole movement today that tries to say, “You’re this type”—you know, type psychology is so popular, right? So you’re this letter type, or that letter type, you’re green, you’re blue, you’re this kind of person—it’s not true. Individuals are complicated, and the skills attached to an individual are also complicated.

I know for sure that I’ve developed certain skills a lot faster than other people. I also know for sure that there are other skills I haven’t developed as fast as was expected of me, because I have a very specific type of brain and a specific kind of thinking approach. In different contexts, I respond in different ways. It’s too complex to say, “Down with that,” or “Yes, I fully support that.” There are considerations to make in every kind of circumstance.

The Importance of Life Experience and Passion in HR Careers

Lydia: Finally, Gabriele, what advice would you give someone who is starting out in this very complicated, very interesting people space today?

Gabriele: To start, you need to figure out where you can add something to the conversation. For career changers, it's important to think, "Okay, what have I accumulated in my experience so far that can be of use in a people role?" This is my personal opinion, but I appreciate the fact that I didn’t start in HR. I think that gave me so much leverage because, for a few years, I worked as a customer of HR. I could see HR as a service user, and that perspective is invaluable when you later start serving a business.

I think the people roles require life experience before you can be truly effective. Another point I always like to emphasize, and I know this sometimes angers people, but I believe in it strongly; you need to have an unconditional desire to have a positive impact on people’s lives and play an active role in the success of the business. You need to be dedicated to that. I don't think this is a job you can last long in unless you believe that people can change and that you can have an impact based on how you choose to do things. That should be a core value.

On the more practical side—more than psychology at this point—if students or prospective students are listening, I would suggest studying neuroscience for sure. Having a thorough understanding of data and data analysis, as well as data storytelling, seems increasingly fundamental. This is where we have truly found a way to demonstrate impact and relevance to the business.

Not to mention the amount of technology being developed to serve what we do is incredible. I get called so many times by startups asking for my feedback or opinions on what they're developing. I love doing that, and there’s so much happening out there, especially thanks to AI. The next phase of AI is going to be when we finally understand how it can really help us because it will be applied in practical ways. So, understanding technology in industrial-organizational (I-O) roles is becoming really important.

Lydia: Yes, as you said, data storytelling accompanies the analysis and it accompanies the technology. So, there are different phases that a person in the people space needs to look into in order to really embrace that role today, right?

Gabriele: Yes. It's organic growth and I don't think you can set all of these objectives at once. You need to start from something and that's why I said start from where you can add something to the conversation. Start from your life experience. For me, training was a natural way to do it. I love delivering training. I love facilitating coaching as well. I don't think I became a robust coach until I had enough life experience. So, yes, many things. So, take them one step at a time.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Gabriele, for your insights and especially your time today. For those listening in, as you said, maybe some prospective students or someone who's looking for a career change or wanting to know exactly how they can grow, where can they contact you to take the conversation further?

Gabriele: Yes, sure. So I do have a website where I have kept a bit about my philosophy and my approach to talent and all the clients that I had as a consultant. So that's www.thecoachpsych.com and I am also on LinkedIn. Add me if you want to start a conversation. That's as far as it goes for my social presence because I'm not really anywhere else. But yes, I guess LinkedIn or the website is a great way to get in touch and I'm always happy to make new contacts and network.

Lydia: Thank you again, Gabriele. And we have been in conversation with Gabriele Galassi from Wise. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe and stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.