EP48: OKX - Talent Acquisition in Web 3.0 (With Alex Lim)

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.

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Transcript

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, and stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and with us today is Alex Lim of Global Talent Acquisition Operations at OKX.

Thanks for joining us, Alex.

Alex: Thanks for having me, Lydia.

Alex Lim’s Journey

Lydia: So, tell us a little bit about your journey into talent acquisition, Alex. You've been in the tech and gaming space for some years now I understand.

Alex:  It’s been exciting in my career journey, from games to tech in the early 2010s. I was on the agency side of recruiting. I had a Japanese client that I was supporting. During that time, I was exposed to the huge potential of that industry where creativity and tech combined. There are many reasons I eventually joined the video game industry. We’re talking a lot in regards to innovation.

So, the career opportunity that offers was a wide range of positions. There were many positions that the industry was hiring for, from game developers, programmers, and designers to marketing management.

When I was with Ubisoft, the company invested in the future of young talent. Many of them that I have known and recruited back then are now contributing to the worldwide gaming ecosystem. It felt great to see how much they have grown in their career. Later down the stages, I was responsible for leading and mentoring talent acquisition functions in Asia Pacific. Today, I’m in the FinTech Web 3.0 space and it’s exciting.

Everyone can be part of a major revolution once in a career for some, maybe twice. So, I’m excited to be in this space.

Lydia: I understand that your current role at OKX is in talent acquisition operation. So, what are some areas that you prioritize since you've taken on?

Alex:  Today, I have the opportunity to support the transformation and improvement of how talent acquisition is defined. We’re building strategies, processes, best practices, training, tools, automation, and employer brand to help all teams around the world increase our ability in talent acquisition. A big part of our work is going deep to understand our wins and pain points. How do we use data to present a better understanding of our performance? In the beginning, we put in the effort to use data organization. Those numbers help us to tell a lot about the areas that we did well. Importantly, we are also looking at the numbers to tell us how we should be prioritizing our projects and programs.

We’ve done quite a bit in the last few quarters especially. There’s a lot more that we’re focusing on this year itself. What about our interviewing techniques and experience? It’s both ways. It’s not just how we build employers better but how to get our hiring managers and interviewers to upgrade in terms of the experience that everybody should deserve in this process itself. We’re using tools that help us improve our productivity, better sourcing ability, and a better candidate experience. And of course, we’re putting in recognition. We invested in such an amazing effort and we want to celebrate it as well.

Navigating the Complexity of Blockchain Technology

Lydia: As you innovate your own processes and look into different ways of doing things, using data to enrich the way you strategize your talent acquisition plan, what are some challenges around acquisition in the web three space that you’ve encountered?

Alex: It’s challenging for several reasons. The demand itself is just one. The industry is growing at a rapid pace and there’s a high demand for skilled professionals who can navigate the complexity of this industry and the ever-changing landscape of blockchain technology. This is a topic that is on top of our minds all the time.

The other part is the technical expertise required. It requires a deep understanding of complex technical concepts such as global distributed systems where the approach can sometimes be slightly different from one region to another. Finding candidates with that sort of niche skill set can be difficult and this talent pool is extremely limited today.

This space, being relatively new with the limitation in the areas that we are focusing on such as blockchain or Web 3.0 development, has been one of the key challenges. We have to take a step back and find a new approach to sourcing for and attracting top talent in this landscape.

Lydia: There's also that element of competing against time, competing against, obviously, your competitors, right? Therefore, the talent that you're looking for, especially for their niche, what do you do to stay updated around the developments that you mentioned, happen so rapidly?

Alex: I think this is actually not just from the TA space. Each company itself does have a product team. We do have people who will look into market intelligence and insights that are actually available.

We have been encouraging our TA teams to focus on partnering with the business closely to understand what's been around in the market. What are some of our competitors? What are they actually doing? Be it signing up for a newsletter, this could help. And from our product team itself, that sort of partnership, that sort of sharing about the challenges, or our product development, stay engaged with the company, and that really can give you an edge among some of our recruiting competitors.

Lydia: And this kind of collaboration that happens internally, how often do you do this?

Alex: It’s not really something that has been regulated. I think the culture of the company is important. There’s always a sharing habit. We have multiple messaging groups within the company itself in different parts of the world. That sort of news update has given us access to information. Sometimes you might not necessarily need to tap a particular department to get specific information, but the updates that you get from the product team, marketing team, and technology team can help a lot when we are communicating with candidates.

We get to know our advantage compared to another competitor and what sort of USP we have over some other tech companies, for example. This sharing culture in the company has been something that we do a lot and I think it does help. It’s not difficult to get an appointment to get product updates. We have a strong sharing culture here and that is amazing.

Sharing Organizational Values and Visions

Lydia: So, what are some tips to hire successfully within the Web 3.0 space?

Alex: Very good question, Lydia. I like to believe that the backbone of this industry is built largely by tech and culture. It’s important for the company to have reliable technology and service for the users. That’s one part. The next part is identifying candidates who are passionate about this industry. How do we go about sharing our organizational values and visions? That’s important.

It takes two ways: from the communication perspective, identifying candidates who are passionate and able to share what your company is all about. What are the cultures? What are your values? What do you focus on? I think that’s the story that organizations need to speak up a lot more. And last but not least is to leverage online communities and build engagement with them to form relationships as potential candidates. Obviously, you won’t be able to hire everyone in the market.

We need to strategize in terms of immediate hires and profiling candidates for future needs as the business grows. If you focus on senior positions, there are also a lot of young talents who could be building up their career and becoming a manager that you would love to hire in your organization. That sort of engagement needs to continue.

It’s a CRM approach: how do you go about profiling and staying up-to-date on industry trends? From the growth perspective, it’s also a big part of talent acquisition. Knowing what your competitors are doing so, you can do a better job. This is important.

Lydia: In terms of candidate inquiry on the company, we're looking at a talent market that is competitive, and people are looking at, perhaps, for the same niche skills that you mentioned before.

So, in terms of the candidate, what exactly are they looking for when they inquire about a company? Do they ask specific questions?

Alex: Let's talk about the story. What is your company actually building on? If you're actually talking about the tech part, this is actually what we do. You need to tell a story and be more open about what you're actually building from a tech perspective. Then I think a lot would be on the product as well. So, product engineering would actually be the true focus.

These roles are the most in-demand positions in the market. You need to be able to convey a message and talk about your product and technology, and that would trigger their interest. Eventually, candidates or talent know that, okay, your organization, it's not just looking for another software engineer, but it’s the product they’re building. Does that actually relate to what they are interested in?

So, that part of the process whereby you will have to actually be going through the interviewing process to align with what the role is all about. What the organization is actually looking at from the long-term perspective itself, I think that's an art.

Lydia: This then contributes to your efforts on retention and growth within the company. So, are there specific initiatives they've been implemented, or is there something that goes into the design of that? That introduction of the company that allows the candidate to see it.

Alex: We measure a project starting from late last year where the entire website was revamped with a focus on candidates for the talent pool. We improved a lot with regard to visuals and the marketing aspects of our brand. The experience we hope to have for a candidate who could be looking around for a job search is one major project that we did.

Subsequently, we also defined our interviewing process in each of the different rounds. What are the key criteria that we’re looking for? What is also out in the market is that you often could be asked repetitively similar questions in each round of just one job application. So, we helped design a more holistic approach. This is the desired skill set and these are the values of talent that we love to work with. How do we break it down into different rounds of interviewing sessions to give a good experience? We are looking at different things throughout so it becomes more conversational rather than an interrogation.

It’s two-way. You don’t want to just understand what the candidate is capable of doing, but also promote the job and sell the company. That’s where we have invested quite a fair bit of time and it’s still ongoing with a few more initiatives.

It’s never going to be set in stone that these are the only ways to do things or the only questions to ask. We constantly look into feedback and our success rates. Going back to data helps us understand how successful we’ve been and what areas we can continue to improve and innovate. That’s where we don’t stay stagnant in our job.

Speeding Up the Interview Process

Lydia: So, this competition for the kind of talent that you're looking out there is fierce, right? And the length of that interview process itself can become, as you said, an area of focus where you want to convey some things to the candidate, as well as understand what they're capable of.

But some candidates, particularly those in demand, may lose interest if the process takes too long. So, what are some factors that recruiters or talent acquisition professionals should consider when they design an interview process that is effective?

Alex: I mentioned that the experience part is very important. You don’t want to be feeling interrogated when you get into an interview. So, we have structured different rounds [of interview sessions] assessing for different requirements. But that really also depends on the seniority of each of the roles that a company is looking for. Are you looking at one or two very senior openings? We’re talking about maybe 60 software engineer roles, or are you looking for specialization? I think a few fundamental approaches a recruiting team member could do is to look into the job requirements, even going to understand with the hiring managers what the key requirements are that your hiring manager is looking for.

And then, how are they being evaluated? And then even going to the job description, do you want to have a long list of requirements? I think that’s something that we should learn how to eliminate. It’s not the best way to have a super long job description. That’s just going to narrow down your candidate pool. So, the interviewing process should be tailored to the specific requirements. How do you identify the key skill sets, knowledge, and experience that are needed? And then you design interviewing questions or technical assessments, for example, that can effectively evaluate such qualities, right?

So, we talked about the assessment part, there are many different kinds of assessment approaches. For tech, you can do whiteboard coding or use Codility or HackerRank, or other coding platforms. But what about areas that we need to cover for behavioral interviews, skill sets, and situational judgment tests? That helps us take a step forward a little bit deeper to understand how the candidate responds in different situations. Consider which methods would be the most effective in evaluating the candidate for that specific role. And then, of course, we have a lot of companies who are hiring maybe 20-30 positions within 60 or 90 days. How do you speed up the process because you cannot have a 60-minute call throughout the interviewing process with the candidate for the next 60 software engineers that you need to hire within the next 60 days?

How do we go about taking an approach maybe from batch interviews? Or how do we work with hiring managers? We have seen a lot of success working with the hiring site to dedicate days reserved for interviewing purposes. That will help us organize our productivity quite well. And then, I think the other part itself is that people conducting interviews should be carefully selected based on their knowledge of the role. Do they know the role enough to assess candidates effectively? So that comes back to another topic: interviewer training workshops, which need to be constantly invested in our organization.

There are some organizations that do that twice a year or once in two years. But that really depends on the growth of the number of interviewers and hiring needs in the organization. So, I think that’s really important whether this is for someone who just newly joined the company. You need to educate and promote a lot about how we have our USP. How do we sell the organization and our mission to the market and to the candidates? How do we even bring people to webinars or tech conferences to help them be better equipped with the approach that we want to be branded? And the candidate's experience is obviously a reflection of your organization’s culture and values. I stress this more than enough because it can impact the candidate’s perception of the organization. So, when the interviewing process is extremely well-organized, transparent, and respectful, and we manage time by design, that will help us a lot in terms of considering whether this workflow is attractive and effective or not.

Training on Unconscious Bias and Inclusive Hiring Practices

Lydia: And Alex, how does diversity play into the strategies, particularly in this industry? And what might be some ways to implement these initiatives?

Alex: That’s a very interesting question. I think we are humans, after all, and humans do have their own biases. But what really important is the application and awareness of why we should avoid any sort of bias. Having DE&I in place can help us minimize the elimination of candidates from diverse backgrounds. It’s not just fintech. We have seen an increase in female representation in organizations. And how do we approach a more diverse background as we move on to various ethnic groups? I think that helps build creativity.

I have been with organizations, especially Ubisoft, where the diverse background of colleagues I’ve worked with has sparked a very interesting approach in terms of how we review our product, gameplay system mechanics, or even the design and visual part. And I think the tech industry has been evolving. Traditionally, males have dominated the engineering employment side. But we have also seen more and more companies taking an approach to make sure we hire more female engineers. With an objective, we can develop a DE&I plan.

I would recommend starting with basic stuff like avoiding using masculine words in job descriptions. That takes no effort and there are online platforms with AI awareness to help redefine how your journey can be constructed. In the interviewing process, have a good mix of interviewers. Can we do panel interviews and bring in colleagues from other departments? Although this can sometimes be limited in terms of options available in engineering teams, it is something that needs to be put in place if you have the DE&I objective in mind. Can we start hiring more female engineers and make that an objective for teams?

We also have quite a number of amazing female engineers everywhere else and that has been able to give a lot of approaches to how it can be done. There are communities like Women in Tech where teams can participate in outreach and network and build more effort and engagement around those communities. And then I spoke about the workshop part: interviewing training techniques should include what unconscious bias is and why we want to have a more inclusive hiring practice to ensure candidates are evaluated fairly.

Let’s also not forget that it’s not just HR or TA teams taking the initiative. It should be around the company and even from the leadership team to share that we have such an approach and it should be encouraged and not deliberate.

Lydia: Is that a concerted effort in OKX in terms of operations policies, strategies, and conversations? Do you have a specific type of ratio that you’re looking to achieve in a set of time?

Alex: We haven't actually had numbers put in place to be completely honest. Because the tech industry has already been first, super competitive. And then when it actually gets into the block three space itself, we are facing another tier of elimination.

That's not going to be so easy for us to actually meet, 50-50 DE&I numbers, to be honest. But what has been put in place a lot is our engagement, which as I mentioned women in tech, or going out to schools have our female engineers to represent OKX. Bring the faces of different diverse groups of people to really come out and let that brand be a lot more diverse. I think that's actually some of the small bites of initiatives that we put on the table today.

Can we do more? Obviously, there's so much that we can do. But this is a very limited talent pool market, and we will continue to do better. That's a commitment that the leaders have been very committed to do. We are putting in a lot more effort than what it was maybe 18 months ago.

Collective Effort to Attract Young Talent

Lydia: Okay, interesting that you spoke about young talent. Attracting them into this industry, then having new perspectives. You've been in the tech and gaming industry for some time, and you've seen the diversity of the talent pool coming up in terms of gender and in terms of cultural diversity. Do you see a greater variety of people coming from the younger talent pool? Those in universities or those who are fresh out of college?

Alex: For sure. I think it’s a collective effort that’s not just coming from schools. Universities have been maturing very quickly in the past few years, especially when STEM became a more trendy topic in the market. Schools are also working closely with MNCs, organizations, and the ecosystem to bring that education.

So, when we talk about DE&I, it’s not just something that ‘Company A’ puts in place and delivers hoping to hit an objective. The wider context is also collaborative work done together by industry, country, and government agencies. Everyone needs to play a bigger role to help get the collective results we’d love to see. And yes, I have definitely seen more future young talent interested in the tech industry. It doesn’t require any further introduction because big brands like Meta, Google, and Amazon have always been out in the market hiring young talent aggressively every year. And that’s where we come in to compete with big tech companies.

Because this space is new. How do we make our prices? How do we talk to people? I think where we have done a little bit more is also down to the up-close-and-personal approach: students visit our office, going down more often and working with their professors to be able to share more about culture, life, and products in OKX, for example.

That’s a continuous investment that any company wanting to invest in or having a growth plan in place needs to focus on as well. You just can’t hire everyone you’d like to hire in the organization no matter how much you pay. There’s going to be a lot more consideration for a candidate talent to join your company. It needs to also be exciting. Some people want work-life balance or better benefits or are looking for the purpose of their role in the company they join. So, you need to customize your menu to suit different talents as an outreach strategy.

Investing in HR Technology

Lydia: Let's move on to the topic of HR. There are so many tools out there. Plenty of different types of ways of doing things to optimize your processes to keep up with these changes, track, use that data, improvise, and do it again. That sort of thing. So, what kind of impact in your experience, have you seen with HR technology?

Alex: First of all, I'm a big fan of tech, which is why I'm actually in the tech industry. And it will not make sense if TA or HR are not using tech, right? I'm a strong believer that if software and tech can help the team to do a better job, I highly recommend that every organization actually invest. There are a lot of options in the market.

Lydia: Everything's serving specific functions.

Alex: Then you have to talk about the integration, whether A. could integrate with B. Is this actually going to get a few more stakeholders to come in and have a buy-in? It’s a super complex conversation. In the last few years, there has been a trend of bringing in AI chatbots to serve employee needs. It’s a super complicated topic to start off with, but you need to invest. It serves the purpose of something that you have been struggling with. You need to identify what the pain points are in your environment. There’s integration, price models, customer service, and how long the company has been around for. There’s just a long list, but you need to construct that list of must-haves as a checklist.

There are also a lot of companies considering internal development. That really depends on priorities. In the space that I work in, you want to have a recruiting function that can serve you with efficiency and high productivity. That can help the business bring in the numbers and talent that we’re looking for. HR tech is helping us eliminate a big part of administrative tasks from the start to the end of the candidate journey.

I don’t have the best recommendation for how to go about doing that, but always start off with a checklist. What are your pain points? What are you trying to solve? Think about certain constraints and limits that you are trying to push. Who are the stakeholders that you need to convince? That’s where the project will be more fruitful.

My objective for running global talent acquisition ops is to make recruiters’ lives easier, so they can spend more time hiring better candidates for that team or product, or company.

Lydia: What about ChatGPT? Have you implemented that? In what ways have you benefited?

Alex: It’s one of the best inventions and has only recently become a trendy tool that everyone uses. For example, if you have a lot to write for a presentation or content building, ChatGPT can help you a lot. But be careful. It can give you 60-70% of the content you need, but you still need to refine its suitability. It’s available and has helped me a lot in the context of my work.

If you search for ChatGPT alone, you will come up with a lot of interesting results. I’m thankful that so many users are putting in the effort to edit videos, show screenshots of what they’ve done, and introduce new products that focus on ChatGPT. I’m learning a lot on social media platforms as well.

I encourage everyone to explore social media more because it keeps us up to date with trends in the market. You don’t want to be confined to just dealing with candidate processes every day. You need to be out in the market, knowing beyond what you know to bring value to your role. If that can help improve your productivity and as you grow, you need to learn. The learning never stops.

Lydia: I think you may have covered the next question as well. What advice would you give someone starting out in recruitment today?

Alex: What advice would I give? There’s so much. As we were talking about, we covered quite a bit. First of all, be open-minded and eager to learn. The learning never stops. I stress that every time. What are some of the best practices in the market and how can they be appropriate and suitable for your organization?

I’m someone who loves to cook, so I like to say that recruiting is like a dish. When you bring it into an organization, you have to mix and match the spices and ingredients to find what’s suitable for your organization. That helps a lot.

Talk to people. There are many experienced people in the market. Don’t hesitate to reach out for advice. Having a trusted career mentor is important when you’re in an organization and part of TA communities. That’s when you can network and ask for advice and recommendations on strategy, employee EBS approach, or even HR tech that we spoke about not too long ago.

Be engaged in that space. Don’t stay behind Zoom or Teams or whatever. Be out in the market, talk to people, be engaging as much as possible, and have an open mind.

Lydia: Thank you very much, Alex. It's been a real pleasure having you on the show. And thank you for sharing your knowledge and your insights with us. So, where can the audience connect with you?

Alex: Well, the easiest way is probably going onto LinkedIn, Alex Lim. I'm happy to connect with you, and if there's anything that I can provide, from a mentorship perspective or advice, I'd love to actually learn something from any of you who would like to get connected as well.

Lydia: And we have been in conversation with Alex Lim of OKX in Global Talent Acquisition Operations. Thank you for joining us this week, and remember to subscribe to our channel, so stay tuned for more insights from All-In Recruitment.