‍Nasser Oudjidane 

Hello and welcome to our series of Scaling Stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the world's fastest growing companies. I'm excited to introduce our guests today, Simpson, the global head of country operations ta at Wolt. Robbie, a huge welcome and thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? 

Robbie Simpson

Yeah, sure. Thanks for, uh, having me on. So I'm Robbie, as you said. I'm global head of country operations in Wolt Market. You're at Wolt what that effectively means is, um, leading up quite a large part of our TA team, which we can maybe get into more later. Um, been here for coming up to six months now, so it's still very new in the role.

Nasser Oudjidane 

My background's actually in tech recruitment, so I've had a little bit of a pivot before here. I was leading up a large part of the Hello Fresh Tech team. Then I was, uh, an RPU recruiter in a FinTech than an agency recruiter. What feels like a another life, so a fairly standard sort of career progress.Thanks for that. And looking back through, through the journey, you've, you've said in the past to me that you can learn more from poor culture than about good culture. What are some of the key reasons and takeaways from your experience. 

Robbie Simpson  

So I think like peer culture is easier to learn lessons from cuz it's easier to. Point out and recognize it. If you think about what's good culture, be it here in Vault or previously in Hello Fresh, it's actually quite difficult. It's usually a lot of little things going right, but pure culture, bad culture, we've all got that experience. We go, ah, that wasn't right. The way they delivered that news, the way that we were measured didn't sit right with with me. So when I'm in a leadership position, I'm not gonna go down that route. For me, when I look back, a lot of it comes down. The difference between being in a performance driven organization and a results driven in pure culture companies, predominantly they've been results driven, which is really encouraged bad behavior. So if you think about the strongest people, they're really the people that are in it for themself and actually drives down the overall average. So the average performer, their performance is. And it creates a bit of a toxic environment where people start to gamify the system where it's less about a team driving towards a goal and more of an individual driving towards a kpi. But when I think about good culture, it's more about performance driven. The end result might be hiring, but they're always interested in how are we getting there? How are we improving? Is time to hire going down? Is candid experience going up? I think that's like the key lesson. That I learned between pure culture organizations and, and then good culture organizations.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, it, it also reminds me of something that I've, I've heard in the past, which is care of itself when you're talking about performance and, uh, and, and results driven. So if you're doing the right things, those small things every. Then you're actually gonna hit the goals and, and results, uh, in the end. said in the past as well something that I found, uh, particularly interesting, which is recruitment as a product. Could you perhaps, uh, elaborate to our audience on what is it and why is it to you? 

Robbie Simpson  

A little bit of a buzzword. Buzzword, bingo. And really that's what it is. Recruitment is a product. It's effectively framing a style of recruitment, which makes it a lot more digestible for stakeholders, especially in tech. Good recruiters are already doing this. It's just not really packaged up in a bowl, uh, with a nice bowl on top of the box. But it's thinking about what's the, what's the candidate and stakeholder journey, and why are you doing stuff? So if you were to map out your entire process and think about it as a product and then the customers, your stakeholder, and your candidates, maybe even your HR team, what are the touch points? How does it make you feel? How does it make them feel? What are the barriers to entry, et cetera, and how does that reflect what the customer currently wants? So if we think about what it could be right now, when we think about recruitment as a product, we should think about pain and gain. So what's the pain someone's willing to go through to get the gain for hiring managers? Let's say the pain might be filling in a hiring request sheet, but the gain is having someone be hired, so it's worth it. And then on the candidate, That gain used to be to get a job with more salary, with more scope, with more responsibility. But has that fundamentally changed? And does your product need to change the recent news of redundancies? Then the gain might just be having a job in which is stable, which means that the pain that you're willing to go through might be slightly higher. I'm not seeing compromise on candidate experience, but I'm also saying that maybe you're able to do things slightly. Maybe the product adapt. So maybe instead of having to offer the best salaries in the world or really focusing on how you're selling things, maybe your TA team needs to focus on the speed of the process because that's what candidates are now more interested in is getting that next paycheck. Or maybe it's something completely different. Like when I think about how we used to recruit TA people when there was a huge amount of pain for the business, we took away assignments, we said, We're not gonna make anyone above senior do assignments. But now maybe people are more willing to do assignments because they're, they've worked in organizations where peoplgo that extra step cuz there's not that many roles availablee haven't done assignments and not been happy with the level of recruiter. Or maybe they're just willing to . So it's all about reevaluating the product that you're offering everyone, including stakeholders. HR customer, um, I'm sorry, candidates, uh, um, along with recruiters, coordinators, and sorcers.

Nasser Oudjidane 

How often would you. recommend, or perhaps if you look, uh, at, at what you've, what you, what you've done here with regards to this recruitment as a product, how often are you reviewing these processes? Uh, tweaking them, improving them, or, or is there something that is putting the calendar to, uh, to update?

Robbie Simpson  

when, I'm thinking about this, it's all about art. If you've got a huge, if you're hiring for a lot of sales roles that sit, then maybe it's worthwhile looking at the entire product and challenging each step. So why are recruiters doing the screen? Why is X, Y, and Z sending the offer and just, just questioning each state. But you can't do that every week. So if it's more of a, we have 20 backend engineers to hire every month, then it's just constant iter. Really looking at focusing on one part every month, every week, and just saying, oh, if we AB test this, does this change? Then take more of a holistic view. Has the market changed? Is there any additional market insight that we can pull? That means a product, which is our recruitment pipeline needs to change. Has the business changed? Are we still meeting on business needs? Has anyone done any stakeholder interviews? How often are you interviewing your stakeholders? Are you happy with the quality of hire six months after a year, after, two years after? Are you happy with the process? Is it matching your needs? Do we need to do a rein intake more often? So it is constant iteration. Good leads do this without needing to be instructed. So a lot of it is to terrible to say, but a lot of it's around feel, and usually stakeholders and candidates will put up their hands when something's not. So it's just making sure that you've got the feedback loops, that you're able to then make iterations based on them loops rather than any set. One month, three month, one year dead.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, it's, it's great that you spoke about Phil, because I know that you feel passionately about data driven recruitment and how. How you lead with data or informs decisions and, and overall insights. been your journey with becoming data driven, and why do you think that's important, especially in kind of today's recruiting landscape. 

Robbie Simpson  

Yeah. Again, data driven recruitment is a another buzzword in which you'll see on. , JD and LinkedIn profile now, and I think that that's almost justified cuz it does mean something different for everyone. Like a question is like why is data driven recruitment important? Which there's no one set answer for something to be truly important to you. It has to link into your values. So if you're going to drive data driven recruitment or higher data driven recruitment, you need to understand that or you need to build an organization which data. Empowers people's values. So when I think about why I'm data driven, it's because when I think about my personal values and what I wanna do professionally, which is provide a fair recruitment, process that that's respectful, that's equal, that dignity and is overall just feels good. I need data to justify that. I don't have data that I can't guarantee that better you from back window or. exact same experience. Um, and that, that's why it's important to me. And if you're wanting to drive this, you have to find out why it's important to not just you, but important to your team. And that comes into understanding your team values as well. And then the next thing is making your team data literate. The hardest step that is really rarely done is investment in te when it comes to data literacy. Many of us don't come from traditional science backgrounds or mathematical backgrounds. And we were just expected to be able to interpret and build a story around data without really understanding how to point out what's what's wrong. And that's what for me has made me more data driven is I do have that mindset and I love teaching it to people to point out like, okay, I think is, not think as data driven because the data's not telling that story, but that actually the data quality. So your gut feel or your experience is right, we just need to clean this out. And that really gives people more confidence in their decision making as well.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Do you have any tips for our audience on what are the most important things to track and how to track them? 

Robbie Simpson  

The, the major thing is measure what matters. So what matters to you? What matters to your team, and what matters to your organization? These a million metrics that you could measure out, But what's gonna drive you and only pick a couple? So if you look at recruitment as a product or product, what's your one metric that matters? For instance, last year I only focused on Time tire for four, five months. Because my idea was if we could reduce that, we would increase offer acceptance, cause candidates wouldn't get as many competing offers. We'd increase engagement because, and we'd increase candidate experience cuz recruiters had to be on top of their candidates to drive it, given no update updates, saying how are things going? Just focused on that. And then everything else started to align fairly well. What people do wrong is they have a non data driven recruitment function and then they give. 20 data points with no structure, no boundaries of what good looks like. Make the big thing the big thing. Pick one or two metrics that are related to your values and just focus on that for a time period.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Love it. Go, almost goes back to if everything's important, then nothing gets without that focus and clarity. You've assumed the role as the head of global country operations, uh, talent acquisition, which is, which is quite a mouthful. What are, what are your responsibilities? Uh, you're still reasonably new, and what are some of the biggest surprises so fare?

Robbie Simpson  

Yeah, it's, it's a long title. Um, in regards to responsibilities, uh, I look after, uh, six core teams, which are focused on 23 of all 24 different countries. Uh, and then we are responsible for everything from our associate. Two, which was our hourly hiring, all the way to regional general managers, which we'll look after anywhere of eight countries, so thousands of employees. Um, and really to make sure that that hiring process, the right people are being hired at the right time, and then empowering them teams that the main goals for me right now is to standardize the process. So make sure that if you're a candidate that's applying in Japan, you get the same experience as a candidate in fin. then empowering the team as well. So it is quite difficult to, um, empower a team to make such radical changes in, in geographies which they're not actually based in. And then also make sure that there's enough learning so we don't have to learn one lesson in Cyprus, then relearn it in Poland and relearn it in Norway. So making sure that cross communication happens. I, I think the biggest, the biggest surprise was probably quite predict. Um, and people did warn me about it, which is obviously the culture differences when you're talking about being in a truly international role where one meeting you're speaking to someone in Japan, then the next and um, the Netherlands, then the the next, in Germany, your communication style has to change pretty rapidly and you also have to be very forgiving of how you might interpret other people's communications, um, as well. So I think the biggest surprise for me, How, uh, how difficult. I find that that's at times, but also how rewarding when you realize, okay, I understand what they're actually saying, or they understand what I actually mean.

‍Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Something I found quite thought-provoking, uh, was when you, you've said candidates are customers and. Can interpret that in several ways. What can you talk about that and tell us what you mean? 

Robbie Simpson 

Yeah, it is exactly that. We're a consumer focused business, so candidates are customers, whether it's a new market or an existing one. The chances of a candidate use no product. Having used it are extremely high, is not a metric that we have right now. But, um, I think if we looked at it, we'd find that most people either adopt a product or at least have given it a try. So we really have to be respectful of that, that these are the people that are paying those salaries, they're the people that are paying for whole office supplies, et cetera. So they deserve that respect. And, and with that comes the, uh, the next part. As we're a recruitment organization, we've got our customers, which are candidates, stakeholders, and ultimately the business to not forgetting that we have to provide a service level, and that service level is defined by the type of tea organization you want to be. But I always try and relate it closely to what your support is. So if you are a support. Organization like us. If you look at the reasons that people use our app so much is a lot of it is the support service. So we need to hold ourself to that standard, and we can't do the same SLAs, but we can hold ourself to that outstanding standard. If you go into an app, you'll get a reply within, I think the average is about between one and two minutes no matter what. And then if you, if you message our CEO on LinkedIn, you'll probably get a reply within 24 hours to two. . So we need to make sure that that happens in recruitment. And obviously we can't get back to you in two minutes, but why are we not doing, uh, no update on Fridays? There's a lot of anxiety now with people losing jobs. It's actually really nice just to say, Hey, really sorry we didn't manage to do the debrief meeting. We've got got a booked in on Monday. Have a good weekend. Or it can be even more generic than that. You're uncertainty. these no news catch up with you next week. And really making sure that we're thinking about what the feel. What's the feel of our customers and candidates? How do they feel towards Vault, even when it's not gray news? If that's positive, then we'll retain them as customers, but we'll also maybe retain them as future candidates in the Future.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, and, and perhaps stepping up to hiring the funnel. , do you find the challenges in hiring be more of a discovery problem or an engagement problem? What? What's your take on that? 

Robbie Simpson  

It's a super broad question when you think about the rules that we currently operate in. If you chat to any hiring manager, they will always say that there's not enough. as well. So naturally it's can you discover the talent and, and then you look on the other side and people drop out. So are we engaging them enough? Did to answer that question, I think as a recruiter you need to really figure out what role are you working and where do you need to bit your time. And then this goes back to recruitment as a product. If you've got a massive discovery problem, then you need to put. Product hat on and build it around, finding people and retaining them. If it's a case of engagement and you can find these people easy, but you, you can't get them engaged, then maybe your recruitment product needs to be quicker. Maybe it needs to be something in which it's one, two clicks and then they've applied and, and reduced that barrier of entry. So it, it's hard to say, but as an individual, I think you need to look at each role individually and then build that product.

Nasser Oudjidane

And in, in terms of engagement, sometimes it could be your employer brand that will perhaps prevent the application or the, the reply that's positive to take the call. Uh, perhaps it could be the, the messaging of the recruiter to actually sell the role and. perhaps this brings us to the next question, which is about alignment of characters, traits that recruiters have aligned to and marketing. What's your take on that with how closely you think it's aligned? 

Robbie Simpson 

So sales and marketing. I most a lot of recruiters would say recruitment sales. At least that's something I hear all. . So I think it is aligned, um, with sales fairly closely. We were probably not aligned as the type of technology we use and, and investment and core skills. Uh, we always say recruitment is sales, but how much money is the business investing in sales in terms of, um, in terms of coaching compared to. how much, where is the technology? If you look at any good CRM system, automatic follow ups are, are just a given. Um, the, the CRM systems, um, investment, whether it's you've got a product manager, engineers, et cetera, that's a given. But with ATSs, we mainly, we mainly rely on recruiters, non-technical recruiters, to do all of that. So there's definitely an underinvestment there. And, and then when we look at marketing, we can see the same, it's, it needs, in a lot of cases, there's a lot of drive from employer branding people to want to professionalize marketing, but it's rarely, rarely that you see the buy in from the business. And, and a lot of it is cuz the media ROI is quite low. It's actually really hard to track employer branding ROI on it, unless if you have QR codes or, or hyperlinks that are, are trackable. It. It's hard to justify extreme expenditure, so I think we're a long way behind, but as long as we stay relatively close, then a lot of times we can actually lee off of them and we get that extra account because sales aren't using it, or we get that bit more budget cuz marketing feel bad for us, et cetera.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, I find that fascinating and usually. Sales and marketing expenditure would be maybe 50% if not more, of what the business is obviously on, on the industry. That's kind of the level within b2b sas. I think unfortunately, recruiting is seen as a cost center and sales marketing are seen as a profit center and, and that's unfortunate because that's not necessarily how it is. 

Robbie Simpson 

That goes down to, let's say the candidates or customers part is when you think about recruitment or HR in general on the p and l, it's an, it's a pure loss making. So how do you actually showcase that these some profit there and when you go candidates or customers, A perfect example could be expansions if you expand into a new region, the first touch point with a new brand could easily be through TA and TA marketing. So if there's a way and, and companies have done this, Hey ya, or Hello Fresh is pushing this as well. If there's a way in which you're able to have a hyperlink which says, okay, this candidate has, uh, sorry, this customer was a can. and then link that to finance and show that tea's bringing in these people. And maybe that's a way that you build this more structured empathy around around ta. We'll never break even on that front through these discount codes, et cetera, but at least it will highlight the importance of having good touch points and investment.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Absolutely. You, you've mentioned, uh, that there are changes that are happening with, with hiring within recruitment today, and I'd, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this with regards to. Perhaps the recruiters that were hired before Covid in the pandemic and what you are seeing now about the qualities of what a good recruiter is.

Robbie Simpson  

so that the, the qualities of what a good recruiter is. Haven't changed since pre or post the pandemic, but I, we, we lost focus slightly during the pandemic. When companies went through hyper growth, they had very specific needs. Let's say front end engineers are backend into engineers. We, we needed a recruiter that was gonna fill a hundred a year. Et cetera. So when we hired them, we built out these profiles, these very narrow profiles with one speciality, which they were able to source, they were able to interview, and they were able to close backend engineers. So very, very thin profiles. And what that's meant now is when we've pivoted, they're unable to pivot with it. I always refer to it as like the stick and bamboo models. When you've got a stick, if you have lateral pressure on it, it snaps and, and that's what we're seeing with some recruiters is when you ask them to source for a marketing role, they're un unable to source for marketing cuz we are not invested in the core skills. But what a good recruiter for an excellent recruiter is, is like bamboo. So they're able to grow at a rapid rate and be extremely strong in a straight. But also in these lateral load, they're able to bend and contort themselves around that and, and really, really move towards the environment to always be going upwards and, and unlike a stick, yes, it might break, it might have a, a large crack, it might not be optimal, et cetera, but it's still able to function because you've put in that time to make sure that it is completely solid and the people are adaptable. And that's where I see right now. I, I feel sometimes a little bit bad about where we've invested time is we've not given people enough time to grow fundamentals. We, we've built people up very, very narrow. Told them that they're excellent cuz they are excellent, but at the same time, no further investment into them to diversify their career. Really actually discourage people from moving laterally in organizations. So to go back in front end market. Because what the business needs is purely backend and now businesses are starting to pay for it cuz maybe now they don't need backend engineers, but they're really pushing marketing. But all of a sudden these tech recruiters are taking 2, 3, 4 months to upscale onto marketing like they're starting again. And, and that's damaging for everyone.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. And what do you think is advice when recruiting, hiring, and, and perhaps this is specific to tech recruiting, uh, that is total bs. Are there any myths that you think needs to be put in the trash?

Robbie Simpson

So that I, when I started recruiting, I was a crypto specialist, whatever that means. and, and that's what I did for almost two years, is I knew blockchain, I could find you the best, solidity, devs, et cetera, and I was told I needed to specialize it early on. That's rubbish. The core skills in which I focus on have nothing to do with blockchain, but are things that I learn. So am I good at sourcing, closing? Can I manage a pipeline? Can I manage stakeholders? If you can do that, you don't need to specialize. You can pick up a specialism within two, three months. Yes, there'll be some principal recruiters or senior recruiters that have done backend engineering and you'll never get to their level if they've done 15 years of it, cuz they are exceptional. But what makes them exceptional is mainly cuz they do the brilliant basics, extremely, extremely well. And then their knowledge is just that extra 10%, that extra 15%.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Last one before the closing. What, what tech are you using to do your job? Feel free to shout out products that are delivering value.

‍Robbie Simpson

Well, delivering value for money. I would never see a LinkedIn recruiter then, but, uh, we definitely have it, um, as most people do . Um, and then we use Smart Recruiters or ats. I, I use a Zapier a lot to automate things in, in my emails, which is great. If you're using trailer boards, um, and Slack integrations as well, you can really automate a lot of. and then, uh, with remote teams, I would say Miro is definitely worth investment, uh, especially since ta team ta people tend to be a bit creative as well. It can be super fun and engaging for the entire team.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, got me thinking about what you do with recruitment as a product and mapping essentially process Miro remotely with your team. 

Robbie Simpson 

sure. What, when I first started looking into this, I actually just shadowed a bunch of, uh, product manager meetings and then copied their frameworks and really building out from there. Um, most of the templates that you can find on Murro really hold your hand. So you, you don't have to do as much thinking. What can be great is if you start to use mural or, or boards like this is then invite a product owner or a product designer, uh, to shadow you, and they give you like great hints and tips on how to make a bit more engaging.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Great shout. on to the closing questions. What's one piece of advice, if any, that you wish you had when you started? 

Robbie Simpson  

Focus on Deep Work is a great book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. If, if you manage just two hours of deep work, you'll achieve more than what most people do in eight, eight hours or 10 hours. To be honest,

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah, contact switching is one of the killers of 

Robbie Simpson  

hundred percent. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

I believe. It's really hard. Are there anything, uh, that you'd like to share with, uh, content that you've read, listened to or, or watched that inspires you or perhaps has given you some, some knowledge that you think, uh, is unique 

Robbie Simpson

Oh, um, culture Map is a great book for anyone like myself, working in a more multicultural environment by Erin Meyers. That's really good. Along with one. Um, there are great books that I think most people should have on their desk. Be a recruiter, not a recruiter. And then the main thing is listen. So it's not listening to one thing, but listen to as many conversations as you can and start to ask why that active listening is often a given in recruitment, but it's a skill and it's a skill in which most of us fail at most of the time, including. So if you're able to focus on what active listening is to you and nail it, you're gonna learn a hell of a lot.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. What is one thought to value or phrase that you live by? 

Robbie Simpson 

I'm gonna plug my own, be like bamboo. Um, no, think, I think mainly I like to think about what my core values are and then try and relate each decision to. For, for me, no matter what decision I make, is it fair, fair to the candidate, fair to the team, fair to myself? Is it inclusive? Does it drive quality? Now I'm a leader. Does it drive autonomy? If I'm able to make sure that all my decisions link that to my actual core values, then the chances of me regretting it are low, I might make a mistake, but I know that I've done it in good faith.

Nasser Oudjidane 

Yeah. Robbie, this has been an an incredible 

Robbie Simpson 

Thanks for having me.