EP84: Dentsu International - How to Blend Onboarding with Live and On-Demand Components

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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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. My name is Lydia and joining us today is Jen Paterno, VP of Learning & Development / Employee Experience, Global Onboarding & Induction Experience Lead at Dentsu International. Welcome to the show, Jen. Thanks for joining us.

Jen: Awesome. Good morning. Thank you for having me, Lydia.

Unique Ways of Approaching Onboarding

Lydia: Good morning. So, tell us about your journey in the talent space. Jen. I mean, you've been in this space for several years now, I understand.

Jen: Actually, I’ve been in the space for nearly 18 years now. So, I originally started in the hospitality industry, working in learning and development there. That experience brought me everything from end-to-end recruitment to learning and development, talent processes, and employee relations. But I’ve been with Dentsu for six years now, all of those years spent in the learning and/or talent space.

And for the last two years at Dentsu, I have actually been leading our global onboarding program. Prior to that, I had experience in our talent space leading employee engagement and performance development, and in our leadership development space, so I’ve spent a lot of years with our people.

Lydia: In those 18 years, you gained lots of insights into people themselves, [like] what makes a person develop in their role, etc. So, you mentioned onboarding in our conversation prior to recording. What might be some areas that you are prioritizing in your role at the moment?

Jen: So, the way that my team approaches onboarding is, I think, from what I’ve seen, sort of unique in that we’re both doing the onboarding process component and then we are also doing the induction component, which is where the learning and the employee experience comes in.

A couple of things that we’ve been focusing on first and foremost, from the process perspective, is creating a smooth experience, and I know we’ll talk about this a little bit, but creating a smooth experience for our folks from the candidate perspective, all the way through to the employee perspective.

When it comes to learning, being a global organization, we’ve got a large population, we have just about 69,000 employees across the globe, and we hire probably an average of 6,000 a year. So, lots of new people coming in. For me, something that is very important when you have a geographically diverse workforce is helping people connect, whether it’s with their teams or with other new joiners. There’s, of course, the component of needing to make sure folks know about Dentsu and their role and what’s going on.

But what we’ve heard since COVID, is that the onboarding experience can be lonely at times, especially when you are being onboarded remotely. So, some of our countries have more of a remote workforce than others and we do lead with a hybrid approach. Because we want what we’re doing at Dentsu to work for our people as much as it works for us and our clients. So, creating opportunities to make sure that folks are not feeling alone or on an island during this process. We’re still kind of learning and testing what that looks like.

Then, also make sure that with such a complex organization, we’re big, we’re matrix, we do a lot of different things for our clients, everything from creative to ad placement to customer loyalty, it can be a lot to digest when you’re first starting. So, trying to find digestible ways to help people understand the organization they’ve just joined, is also important.

Lydia: How long would that take, typically? I mean, that whole onboarding process itself, not just the introduction to the company, or just really the whole component of making sure that they don’t feel alone or getting them into the culture.

Jen: In an ideal world, after doing some research, I believe that our team should have some sort of touch on our new joiners for the first year. Right now, we’ve got our experience built out to about 90 days, it’s most robust in the first 30, and we’re going to work on filling out the first 90 before we continue that stretch. Obviously, it starts with the highest touch at the beginning. As an employee goes through that journey and spends more time in the organization, the touch will get lighter and lighter just to make sure that we’re offering in-time support for different things that are happening in the organization and checking in on our employees as far as figuring out how the experience is going for them.

In my world, nothing is ever a finished product. Everything is always living, breathing, ready to be iterated, ready to grow and change. So, we make changes pretty frequently as well based on the feedback that we’re getting from both new joiners and their leaders in the business, and we partner with different areas of the business.

So, while my team is responsible for putting together the global experience for Dentsu, we are a small team, we’re scrappy, but the organization is simply too big for us to do the deep work in each area of the business. So, we also act as consultants and partners to help leaders and folks in the business think about what onboarding looks like holistically for their people outside of just that global experience.

Blending Onboarding with Live and On-Demand Components

Lydia: Now, 90 days would be the default, I would imagine for onboarding. But what would a successful onboarding look like at the end of that one-year period? I mean, what does that entail from the employees’ perspective? Now we’ve moved from candidate right into employee first 90 days and then completed your first year. So, what does a successful onboarding program look like? What sort of metrics and how do you measure that?

Jen: So, I think at a high level, we do survey our folks. We survey at the 30-day mark and the 90-day mark, looking at surveying at the one-year mark. First of all, we’re looking at the sentiment. Would employees recommend working here? Do employees feel valued here? Do they understand the culture? Are they able to show up in an authentic way and bring the things about them that made them the best choice for this role? I’m also a certified coach.

So, the human component is very important to me when we are bringing people on board. It’s not just ‘can you tactically do these tasks,’ but it’s ‘are you the right person out of this pool to do these tasks?’

We want to make sure that those people feel empowered to bring those things that made them shine in the interview process to the table. We also want to make sure they understand their job and their role, and we want to make sure that their managers are supportive. So, those are some of the things that we’re looking at in the survey itself; how are they able to do their job? Is their manager supportive of them? Are they having regular one-on-ones? That specific question is not in there, but it’s something that we talk about.

We’re also looking at metrics, like turnover rates. So, anybody that’s in this space, whether it’s TA or HR onboarding, talent knows that if an employee leaves in the first year, that’s a pretty quick decision. Especially with the way the job market is right now. I want to get really aggressive with those metrics. So, we’re also looking at voluntary turnover in the first six months and the first three months.

From my perspective, if someone is leaving three months involuntarily, they’ve decided week one that this is not the place for them, which means at week one that’s falling heavily on my team, because we have the highest touch on week one.

Luckily, we don’t have a lot in the first three months, but I don’t want to have any. Then we’ve got the first six months, people are deciding that in the first month or two, especially if they’re able to find a role. So, those are really tender metrics for me personally, because that means that we’re dropping the ball early on. And it’s likely something that my team can have an impact on without having to ask for too much from the business.

When we look at that one-year mark, I think we’re dipping deeper into the business to understand what’s happening in each area of the organization and how we can help to improve the onboarding there and keep people in the business a little bit longer. So, that’s another key metric for me.

Then we tie in really closely with our employee experience surveys, sort of engagement survey. There are lots of questions there that fit under the same umbrella as some of the things that I’ve said we’re looking at from the new joiner surveys. So, it’s kind of a fourth touch point throughout the year outside of those three surveys where we can see how an employee is connecting to the culture. Are they feeling the sense of belonging that we want them to feel? Are they feeling supported? We asked about our well-being programs, and we certainly feel like they’re well-being-supported.

So, those are kind of three key areas that we look at right now, as well as engagement in our learning program, our attendance rates, and our completion of our onboarding experience, because it’s a blended experience. So, there are live components and on-demand components in all three of our regions

Lydia: Now in your experience, Jen, what might be some critical intersections between L&D or the onboarding process and the recruitment process?

Jen: It’s funny, this is kind of how we got into the process improvement space. So initially, I took this role and actually asked for this role to be pulled into L&D and employee experience because it was very transactional a few years ago. And it was like, it’s fine. We’re getting people on board. It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. But what if we were able to bring our culture into that experience a little bit sooner? Culture of learning, culture of connection, all of the things I’ve been talking about. So, that was the initial remit for our team, it was going to be day one and beyond.

As you can imagine, a large organization has a lot of complexity in the background, especially with technology and systems. It was definitely challenging for recruiters in the background to work with our ops teams and our tech teams to get all of those moving pieces of the puzzle to fit together in a timely manner. So, our team took on that role of kind of, for Americans out there, quarterbacking that process so that we could see where there were gaps. Where might we better utilize the technology within the organization without having to make additional investments? We’ve got tons of stuff [and] we just need to use it right.

So, we spent some time on that and that is, I think, where and I hope if any of my colleagues in TA are watching this, or listening to this, that they’ll agree that is where I think we really improved communication, in order to give our candidates a little bit more of the experience that recruiters are trying to give them because we’ve got great recruiters. They’re personable, they’re good at their job, and everything goes great in the interview.

If you’re a candidate, if things just start to go a little haywire after that, you’re like, was that the lipstick on the pig, per se? Like, is this really a mess in the background? The truth was, it wasn’t. It was just that there were small gaps, that would have a big impact on the candidate experience and then at that point, you’ve got people that are joining that are not fully prepared to immerse in a learning experience or in an employee experience, because there’s still leftover stress from that.

So, that’s the first thing that I hope was a good handoff between our team in TA which is to help make everybody’s lives easier on those teams. It’s been really fun to bring all those people together and collaborate across so many teams and it’s getting more fun this year, as we try to make that happen globally in ways that we have in the market so far.

Then I think the other thing is our recruiters are, they’re active in the programming that we have. So, they’re active in the existing programming that the rest of the learning team has their champions and advocates of learning truly, some of our recruiters are some of the most active learners I’ve ever seen. So, it’s amazing. And having folks at the frontline that are participating and interacting with teams that are providing experiences like this is so critical because they’re brought in right, they know that it’s not lip service, this is something that we stand by, whether it’s from my team, my other partners in learning, my other partners in employee experience. You’ve got recruiters at Dentsu that are telling you from firsthand experience in the room, that we are here to develop you and we are committed to this.

I think number one, it’s great for the learning team because we’re getting our learners through but also, it’s great for our experience as an onboarding team. Because people come in with this mindset that they want to engage in this content and engage in these sessions. Because you’re getting a really genuine heartfelt recommendation from our recruiters.

Embrace Continuous Learning to Stay Ahead

Lydia: In terms of keeping up with the changes in such a dynamic industry like advertising and marketing right now, we’ve seen so many different changes, not just to the way or the technology that is used, but really just practices as well. So, in terms of keeping up with these changes within the industry, how do you ensure that the learning and development initiatives are also keeping up with these trends?

Jen: I’ll speak for myself specifically here for sure. I have a great leader right now and my previous mentor also, he was a big Josh Burson guy. So, I am of course now a big Josh Burson girl. I actually spend time taking courses from leaders in our industry. I’m also a big David Rock girl, love me some Brene, and then also have been focusing on, as someone that was quite averse to AI. Not because of the fear of it taking jobs but more of the fear of it being too smart. I’ve learned how to, or I’m still learning how to, incorporate AI into what we’re doing a little bit more to get smarter so we can focus more on the human element of work.

You will see me frequently at any conference that I can afford to put my little butt on a plane to. I’m going to meet people who are doing different things, working with different technology, and taking different approaches. Learning has always been a scrappy field. It was a scrappy field in my last industry. It is in this industry. We have to learn how to do a lot with a little sometimes just because that’s the nature of the beast, it’s just learning has never been a revenue-generating portion of any business at least not directly.

It’s important to learn from each other, I think what’s working, what’s not, how you support leaders in the process. It’s important as a learning professional to always be learning. So, to be looking for publications that you can engage with, to be looking for thought leaders in the space that resonate for you.

I’ve become wildly obsessed with data over the last few years. So, I spend a lot of time digging into different studies and working on Gallup and Gartner.

And then I’m also a certified professional coach. So, anytime there is any type of learning offered either from my institution or from Gallup, I’m always digging into that, too, because it’s never just about coaching. It’s always about the bigger experience when it comes to employees and development in the talent space.

I think it’s important because not only the industry is changing quickly, but people change quickly, what we need changes quickly, and what people are expecting from work changes quickly. If we’re not staying tapped into that, we’ll get lost really fast.

Lydia: In terms of a diverse workforce, we spoke earlier about getting people in. It’s a global role, and you’re looking at a workforce of that size. When you get talent coming in from such a diverse global workforce, what are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered in developing L&D programs for this group of [people with] plenty of perspectives and different backgrounds and different offerings coming from them?

So, how do you develop something that would bring value to this kind of workforce that’s coming in, and what are some of the challenges that you face?

Jen: So, a couple of the key challenges that I’ll list off, which I’m sure people will be nodding at, are cultural fluency. We only know our lived experience. So, being able to learn what other experiences exist and what people are going through in real-time and then also just kind of cultural components that are standard outside of our day-to-day, like local language and language barriers. We can all only learn well—I’m sure we can learn lots of languages; my brain only has room for two. So, language and translation are always a struggle, as is scalability.

Again, a lot of learning teams are lean and scrappy. So, thinking about how you develop programs that can be scalable for the size of your organization with the tools that you have, the people that you have [is a challenge.]

Then, the other thing I’ll throw on there is it’s 2024. The reality is we have a workforce entering our organizations now that may have never set foot in an office. We have a workforce that may not have set foot in their college classrooms coming up. So, that’s an entirely different component of the cultural perspective. That’s a social-cultural component that’s different from where you’re located in the world or how you were raised.

This is just now the way that some of our newer employees have socialized and learned to socialize and learn to approach work, which is different. Even their ideals about what work means are different. So, all that being said, you have to tap into the people. This is why I made that joke about AI before, but you can ask AI a million questions; it’s not going to tell you who’s in your business. So, collaboration is critical to the success of everything that my team does. The onboarding program that is running right now, which is, like I said, robust for 30 days and has a touch for 90, is not coming from just my team. It’s a deep collaboration with over 130 people across the globe.

Whether that’s in that process component I talked about, or the learning component, or help to deliver programs or helping design e-learning [where] we had an instructional designer do that. It needs to be collaborative; you need to be able to be - you, meaning anyone in this space - you have to be able to take feedback and, at times, criticism. You have to be willing to put the work in front of as many eyes as you can and look at the representation of the folks who are looking at your work.

So, we partner really closely with our DE&I teams as well, before we put anything out to make sure that they’ve got eyes on it—that they’re looking at language, that they’re looking at what we’re presenting, they’re looking at the reality of that stuff. We put everything in front of at least one person in every region. That one person is a very small number. It’s frequently a small team of people in each region to look at and let us know how they think that’ll hit their markets. And then we go back to the drawing board, and we edit and we iterate, and we come back and we do it again until we’ve got something that’ll be appropriate for everyone to consume.

And then it’s always coupled with in-market activity. So again, these folks that are joining, are getting a global program that’s been vetted by our organization and by other new joiners, but they’re getting the in-market support that’s more specific from their teams and their leaders. So, it’s a delicate balance of what can we take a broad brushstroke to. And should we take a brushstroke through globally? And what really needs to be done in a more specific way because it’s not appropriate for a global audience, or we’re not the right people to deliver this type of content in a way that makes sense culturally, for this area of the organization.

I realized we have the luxury here of how many people are at Dentsu and being able to tap that many people. So, this is another reason why I think networking is super critical in roles like this. Because if you’ve got other trusted folks to network with, you’re able to just even have a chat and say like, “Hey, I’m working on something for the Asia Pacific region, and I’ve not been there. And I don’t have a lot of people working there, and I don’t have a partner there. But I met someone—I met a great young woman at a conference last month in Singapore. [I] wonder if I could reach out to her and just run this idea by her and see if she can give me a reaction.” You have to be willing to take the input because there’s no way to know it all. You can read as many books as you want to, but you’re not sitting in that seat.

Crafting a Tailored Learning and Development Strategy

Lydia: So, going back to learning and development, and really planning an effective program for those who are coming in and those who are setting foot in the office for the first year. What goes into planning a learning and development strategy for an industry like this? What kind of data points become critical so that you’ve got an effective program in place? Is this also one of those evolving pieces that you talked about?

Jen: A lot of it is going to be similar, but not the same. So, some of this I’m speaking on behalf of some of my peers and knowing what they do. We are still looking at all the same challenges. I think the scalability challenge becomes, believe it or not, even harder at that point. Because you’re not just servicing new joiners; we’re servicing the 69,000 employees that are already here and that comes with a need for everything from leadership and professional development skills to craft technical skills.

So, there’s learning and development in and of itself as expertise, but none of us on my team, on the learning team, on the employee experience team, have experience in all the areas of the business. So again, it’s about, first of all, knowing your resources. Where can you tap folks who are SMEs in the area where you’re crafting learning that might be helpful?

From the leadership development perspective, we also try to, where we can survey our folks and understand what they’re struggling with, and create learning that is real-time supportive, and that allows them to take learning right from the room into what’s going on in their day-to-day. And then the component of, think of the 70, 20, 10 model, I’m not a huge fan. I know there’s research and data behind it, but I tend to think of the experiential and the social learning as sometimes so closely intertwined, that to me, it’s really 90/10. Because social learning has become so much easier than it used to be when we were in the office.

Every learning experience that’s built, even in the onboarding space, is built with that idea of connection in mind. So, there’s a lot more discussion in learning experiences, especially virtually than there was pre-COVID and that’s an opportunity for social learning and real-time sharing of ideas from folks that are experiencing this. So, we don’t enter the room assuming that we need to have all the answers, but we do enter the room knowing that if we can tap into the collective intelligence of the people in the room, those answers do exist, or different possibilities exist.

So, on top of everything that I mentioned that we do in the onboarding space, which is just kind of a best practice, we’ve adapted across the teams at Dentsu. There is that element of our learners can teach each other as well. That opens up a whole new wealth of knowledge that would take us a really long time to acquire if we were too proud to say, “Hey, why don’t you teach us something too, about what’s happening in our business?” Again, that part allows it to become real-time applicable. Because folks can actually ask each other and talk about things that are happening in the business with an experienced facilitator guiding the conversation.

Lydia: And that becomes organic by itself as well. So, it just turns into a habit or a routine that’s already just sort of jump-started by L&D, and then it just continues on its own, ideally.

Jen: Yes, and hopefully, those people stay in touch. If they have a similar challenge or a similar win, or they share an idea, hopefully, they stay in touch to see how that goes. Now they’ve got the support of a learning team, and an HR team, and all of that, but they’ve also got a new connection they might not have had. That can be a support and a guide and a partner in whatever they’re working on, and hopefully, something they collaborate on [or] work with in the future. Like, now they’ve got this new connection, like, “Oh, you know, Lydia’s brain was really cool in the ideation space and we need some help on our team. I wonder if she would want to pop in for a meeting and help us with ideation or something like that.”

Lydia: This is where, I guess, the challenge comes in. When you spoke about those who are onboarded, that feel isolated, especially when they work remotely—and remote, I would say, not really hybrid, because hybrid gives you the chance to have that kind of social interaction—but remote working…

Jen: Yes, and that’s the component of office culture that I think is important for all organizations to think about. There are still folks within the organization who yearn for the days of happy hour right after work and have memories of being in the office. I mean, I have my favorite bartender over at the Capital Grille when we would be in the office in the city. But there are people that don’t have those memories. So, if we want to continue to create and nurture office culture, it’s got to be intentional.

Dentsu has this phrase; flexible and purposeful working. The idea is, if our folks are coming into the office, we want it to be with intent. We want it to be purposeful and we want to ensure that if someone’s not been there before, especially from my perspective, that they’re getting the welcome that they need, and they’re getting shown around the office.

If they need a badge, they get that, and they know how to access the building, and they know where they can sit, which is anywhere, by the way. So, all those questions that we didn’t use to answer so directly because you would go in on day one. I walked in on day one at Dentsu, and I was walked over to my office and my desk, and my name was on it. My laptop was there. And I was like, okay, cool. Every time I come in, here’s my key fob, and here’s where I sit. It’s not like that anymore. So, we need to be intentional in order to create that collaboration and connection that’s going to continue to drive good work for our clients and a good experience for our people.

Know Your People to the Best You Can

Lydia: You’ve been in the talent space for all these years; you’ve seen what goes into getting the right people, developing them, seeing them through, and getting them comfortable enough to be part of a high-performing team. So, what advice would you give someone who’s starting out in this space today?

Jen: Talent is just another word for people. People are complex; they’re rich and any job that we’re still hiring people for is a job that we need the human component for. I mentioned Josh Bersin earlier, and I made the joke—I was afraid, I’m still a little afraid of AI getting too smart. There are definitely people who are afraid of AI because of the skills that it’s developing that they may have. All that does is open up an opportunity to bring more of the human and people component into work, into every role that we have.

So, when we are in the talent space, we are really in a unique place where not only are we always the people within the organization who should know our people the best and should be able to support our people the best. But we’re also the people in the organization that hopefully should be able to help teach our leaders how to know their people the best and how to get the most out of their people. I mentioned Gallup before; I’m a CliftonStrengths certified coach. People need to live in a space of strength.

They need to be able to work and develop in a space of their talents, not pushed into discomfort so much so that they’re only working on things that don’t feel good to them. We won’t know people’s strengths and talents if we’re not getting to know our people.

So, this space is about knowing your people, knowing what they need, how to support them, how to develop them, knowing how to help their leaders do that because you’re only one person and their leaders are working with them day-to-day, and moving away from the phrase ‘day job.’ We’re a client-focused organization, but our product is our people just as much as it is our media and if we don’t have the right people, our clients are not going to love working with them.

So, it’s for every organization, moving into empowering our leaders to think of their people as part of their product, and what we bring to the table is so unique. That’s what differentiates all the work you do.

It’s not the deck that you turn in, it’s the thought process and the creative process behind the deck that only came from you, or a collaboration of different people. Throw one different person in the mix or swap someone out, and you get a different end product.

So, for me, talent is always keeping your eye on the people and the target of knowing your people the best that you possibly can.

Lydia: Thank you very much, Jen, for your insights and your time today. I’m sure some of the perspectives you’ve given today can definitely go a long way with the audience listening in. So, do drop us your contact details just in case someone who’s listening in wants to pick up a conversation with you on one of these topics.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Lydia, and giving me a space to talk about some of these really important things. The easiest way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I’m super active there. So it’s Jen Paterno on LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a message or a connection request there. It’s probably just the quickest way to get in touch with me, and then we can go from there.

Lydia: Alright, great. We have been in conversation with Jen Paterno, VP of Learning and Development at Dentsu International. Thank you for joining us today, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.