"Build your business through brilliance, not haste. Cultivate a recruitment culture from day one that values meticulous hiring. Commitment and discipline in hiring today shape the success of your venture tomorrow."
In this episode, we're joined by Grishma Dalal, Ex-Global Talent Lead - LoyaltyLion
and Founding Team Member at PrimaryBid, also an adept HRTech consulting advisor with rich international experience handling HR functions across UK, India, Australia and South Africa. With an MSc in Human Resource Management from LSE and a finance background from the University of Mumbai, Grishma shares insights into the dynamic world of work, leadership, and HR
In this episode, Grishma Dalal shares crucial insights in our podcast. Focused on startup challenges, she emphasises tailoring recruitment to core values and strategic networking, drawing from her role as Culture First London chapter lead. The episode extends to advocacy for women's rights in the startup realm, offering practical advice for international recruitment. Ideal for founders and HR professionals navigating the dynamic startup landscape, Grishma's wisdom is invaluable for fostering inclusive, high-performance cultures.
Episode Highlight
Follow Grishma on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Ipshita Sharma
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture, leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.
"Build your business through brilliance, not haste. Cultivate a recruitment culture from day one that values meticulous hiring. Commitment and discipline in hiring today shape the success of your venture tomorrow."
In this episode, we're joined by Grishma Dalal, Ex-Global Talent Lead - LoyaltyLion
and Founding Team Member at PrimaryBid, also an adept HRTech consulting advisor with rich international experience handling HR functions across UK, India, Australia and South Africa. With an MSc in Human Resource Management from LSE and a finance background from the University of Mumbai, Grishma shares insights into the dynamic world of work, leadership, and HR
In this episode, Grishma Dalal shares crucial insights in our podcast. Focused on startup challenges, she emphasises tailoring recruitment to core values and strategic networking, drawing from her role as Culture First London chapter lead. The episode extends to advocacy for women's rights in the startup realm, offering practical advice for international recruitment. Ideal for founders and HR professionals navigating the dynamic startup landscape, Grishma's wisdom is invaluable for fostering inclusive, high-performance cultures.
Episode Highlight
Follow Grishma on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Ipshita Sharma
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks prides itself on being an organisation focused on employee well-being and workplace culture, leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.
Hello and welcome to the Shape of Work, a podcast series by Springworks. My name is Anoop and I am your host. Each week, we'll be talking to top people managers across the world on the future of work and how it's shaping our workplace. So sit back and get ready to find out more from these movers and shakers, as we have a no-holes bar. Anything goes. Conversation with them about their journey, their insights, their thoughts, most importantly, their ideas and vision for the workplace of the future. Join in on the conversation, leave a comment and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. So today we have Ms Grishma Dalal, who has been the global head of talent. Grishma hi, welcome here.
Speaker 3:Hi, Prashant, it's really good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:It's all our pleasure. Thank you so much for joining this call today. So, grishma, you have so many years of such a rich experience. Can you tell us more about your career journey so far?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So. I moved to London back in 2010, stroke 11 and ever since then I've been working with a bunch of SMEs right in the initial part of my career to help them set up HR functions from scratch. This was mainly for UK specific companies in the dental care, health care and gaming sector. And then, in most recently in the past six to seven years, I've been working with a lot of startups, mainly the fintech and the e-commerce space, helping them build talent functions from scratch and helping them scale globally. So some of them have kind of catered to the two different markets, like India, south Africa, australia and with primary bid. I was working on the US side of things as well and loyalty line was mainly UK focused, but my background is totally HR. I have done my masters in HR, but I moved and shifted to talent acquisition about eight years ago.
Speaker 2:Awesome. That's quite a great journey you have had. I wanted to know, based on your experience, what unique challenges and opportunities do startups and scale up space in terms of talent acquisition, and how does this differ from more established companies?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think one of the first few key challenges a startup faces is resources right and the scarcity of those.
Speaker 3:So they have to really think very creatively, very innovatively in terms of how they're going to bring in this talent with those limited resources from a people perspective, from a financial resources perspective as well.
Speaker 3:So that really differs One of the key differentiators from a startup compared to an established company, because typically budgets are not as much of an issue and I think a sense of urgency is also another bit of a differentiating factor because they are more start up to, more answerable to VCs or people who funded them. They have a very small window to really prove themselves, to be able to be successful, so they need to get these hires pretty much as of yesterday. So urgency is like a big, big factor but as, for example, an established company, that's not the issue. When I have partnered with people who worked at established companies, they're typical time to hire can be anywhere from 90 to 120 days, even for a mid-level hire. But that luxury of time startups don't quite have. So the main thing is this the time to really go out there and get the right talent and financial and people resources.
Speaker 2:I completely agree with your points. Also, talking more on this, in your experience, what innovative recruitment strategies have proven successful in ensuring the right cultural fit within startups and scale up environments?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think that values fit, that cultural fit, is what is something the startups talent team or just startup founders should completely be focusing on, more than anything else. So big, big kind of advocate of that. In terms of innovation, innovative strategies, I think what we really try and do is we build values based questionnaires, question banks which are aligned with each of the values that the company is a believer of endorsing, and then we don't equip the kind of interview teams to be able to ask those questions in the most subtle, indirect way possible. You don't have to just follow that as a script. So really equipping and training the interview teams to be able to handle those questions with SWAV is something which is something which often tends to get missed. So we incorporate that into interview training and creating a rubrics so when they're going out there and completing these, conducting these interviews, they know exactly what a good answer looks like. So the rubrics guides them to. If the answer says this, then you get just like five points and four and three and two.
Speaker 3:So I think that's something we started doing recently and it ended up giving us so much, so many better, much better results because there was much more clarity Typically culture for this very subjective right and when you're talking to a person, what you could think is right could be different for me within my eyes. So giving them more direction. There is something we realized was some we've not been doing and we started, we went and pivoted to that. Otherwise, I think really, networking, networking, networking I can't stress on the importance of that to try and be innovative. You know you don't look in the usual places for the usual hires. So, for example, like a head of engineering, don't go out there and look into a typical job boards or the typical platform. Go out there and just speak to people. Go out there and attend those meetups where your aim is not to go and find people, your aim is to go and meet people and then you go out there and make brilliant connections which could lead you to the right person that you're looking for.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Those are some words of wisdom for sure for the recruitment strategies perspective. Also, you have worked on recruitment for international markets including UK, india, south Africa, australia, amongst others, which are all quite diverse. I wanted to know what different markets you know. Different markets may present unique challenges and what are some market specific challenges you have encountered in international recruitment and how did you overcome those?
Speaker 3:Definitely. I think there were quite a few challenges, lot of lessons learned and which we kind of pivoted and, you know, try to adapt to our strategy. In many instances we managed to get success and many we were still learning. But to give you an example, when I was with Clear Score, like I said, I was working on the India side of things in South Africa and Australia three completely different markets, and then UK itself as well. I think one of the mistakes that us as a business made is we just try to replicate the same strategy, the same recruitment process, the same recruitment strategy that worked in UK, into an India and South Africa. And fortunately, because I was from India, I quickly realized that this is not going to work. So, for example, just going out there to an agency to go and get that QA lead, that senior backend engineer with very, very specific skillset like they were looking for someone in Scala it is not going to work. You know they had that 100% trust in the agency, but here in India it didn't quite work. So we quite quickly pivoted and realized that that senior level backend engineer, for example, is not something which will be the best for the Indian markets. Let's rethink the strategy and let's rethink the level that we're looking for. So that's what we kind of did. We pivoted, tried to get a small mid-level hire. We also tried to look at the right geographical location. So we had the office in Mumbai and this was back about six, five years and six years ago, whereas where the technical candidates were not up to speed in Mumbai just yet, it was and we identified after doing some research, bangalore is the place at that point. So we and this, the leadership in India, in the UK, didn't quite know about it, so we had to then make them understand that I think it's time to look at different geographical locations, get them to give them a relocation package and get them to come to India sorry, to Mumbai and that would still be more economical for us. So those are the kind of some of the things that we did and the second kind of things.
Speaker 3:Another role was QA, qa engineer. It was a completely different story there. We managed to find some excellent candidates in Mumbai itself. So we pivoted and actually ended up finding a more experienced person and also a female candidate in Mumbai for that role. So we really had to.
Speaker 3:You have to look at it in very much a case by case basis and also try and look at how you can localize the hiring process. So, again, the hiring process that worked in the UK, which a very detailed tech test which was a take-home test, is something that did work in India. We had to look at some platforms that we could partner with, but they could submit the test online there, and so we three of two to three months into our search, we realized this is not working. That's the same take-home test method. So we pivoted and went to looking at different, investing in another platform.
Speaker 3:So you have to, at every step of the way, you need to look at adapting your strategy, and it's a similar way for South Africa as well. So some fantastic talent out there, but the hiring process, the hiring methods, were not working. So we had an assessment there which ended up getting a much better response. We invited all the backend engineers that we're going to hire there and we could conduct it a day where they got to know each other, got to know us as a business. We got to know them, spend time together. That building and establishing that culture, that relationship was very important in the South African culture, which we realized that, and we adopted the hiring process based on that.
Speaker 2:Great. It's really nice to see this all from your perspective. Also, I wanted to know from your experience what are the key traits or qualities that contribute to a high EQT and how do you identify and nurture these traits during the recruitment process.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, like I said, I know most mainly work for startups and scale-ups and I cannot just stress on the importance on that value. So a lot of our interviewing involves assessing for emotional intelligence with a variety of companies, not just with loyalty line, even in the past. Assessing for emotional intelligence through really probing into each of the, each of the experience that they're really talking about, instead of just focusing on the technical aspect of any project that they've delivered. Try to delve into what went wrong, how did they deal with people, what kind of difficulties they had when they joined the business first. So really probing into the softer side of any project that they're working on.
Speaker 3:And we've identified a key set of traits that really directly sort of link with emotional, with a high EQ and those kind of traits which I'm really happy to share is having the right kind of attitude to being open to change, really adapting, because something in a startup it's really things change literally every single day. You could be working on a project for three weeks and then boom, that needs to be shelved, we need to work on something else. You need to have that openness and that resilience to be able to switch off and start working on something new and having that right attitude instead of completely getting bogged down, is very important. Being adaptable and open to change and resilience these are the three, four key traits that we really delve into by designing questions that are directly pointing and measuring this, that result in identifying people with high EQ.
Speaker 2:I think those are some great recruitment techniques you have implemented In the recruitment process. What strategies do you implement to enhance the overall employee experience and contribute to a positive workplace environment in the global setting? Sure so.
Speaker 3:I think really going out there and building an authentic and real employer brand is just very, very important. The story that you're trying to tell about your brand to attract these people into your business is the USB of the business, and that needs to have a lot stress, a lot on the importance of the strategy that you're creating around it, the thought that you're putting around it. So I think that's something which the talent team needs to spend a fair amount of time on. I think it's quickly becoming the responsibility of the talent function to build that strong employer brand and do in order to contribute towards high quality talent attraction.
Speaker 2:Alright and you talked about networking previously. I wanted to know how important is networking in the recruitment field and what strategies do you recommend for building and maintaining a strong professional network?
Speaker 3:I mean I couldn't stress on the importance of it. I think in the first three years, right in the beginning, I would shy away from it because it can be quite a daunting experience for anyone who's even mildly introverted. But I would like to say that I think you have to. You have to kind of do the kind of networking that really works for you, especially in today's hybrid, remote world. There's so many different ways to network. So I think it's extremely important to build your reputation within the recruitment field.
Speaker 3:Whatever said and done, the talent world, be it in the UK, be it in India, it's actually a very small world. The high quality kind of talent professionals really connect with each other and exchange ideas on a constant basis. So it's very important to kind of keep going on LinkedIn and following people and trying to understand, commenting on the posts that they put, the thought process that they have, contributing to those ideas. Even reaching out to people who you think is worth learning from. Reaching out to them individually, to connect, have a coffee call with them once a month or once a quarter, I think is a great way to stay in the loop of things, to stay relevant in this industry and to kind of have your continue to have visibility.
Speaker 3:Some other very innovative ways I can think of is like, for example, attending webinars is a great way to network. Now one might think how, but when questions and all are posed to each other, going out there and just being very engaged in the webinar helps you identify people, like-minded people, because you'll see another lot of people who would be doing the same, and then you can go out there and connect outside of that webinar with them. That's happened to me literally in the past four months I've connected with at least three to five people and some really great connections. So I would really urge people to attend in-person webinars, online webinars, even roundtables. I think that's a great way to go out there, even if you feel not very confident, to just go and participate and just share a few ideas but spend the rest of the time listening. It's a great way to sort of absorb and understand what's going on in the industry.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Those are some great advice there. Also, grishma, congratulations on being the Culture First London chapter lead for 2023. What are your goals and aspirations for the Culture First chapter in London?
Speaker 3:So yeah, I mean, I came across Culture First, the community, earlier in 2023, early part of the year, and the main goal of this community it's a worldwide community. It's in, I think, like 20, 30 to 40 plus countries of the world. The main goal is to create a better world of work. So and that's something which resonated with me almost immediately you are going out there and just developing, contributing to developing culture which brings people to work happier, which ends up creating better productivity. So it's a bit of a win-win situation for the business, for the people, and just equipping you with tools and strategies to enable you to create a better world of work. That's our goal and, through the community, what we're trying to do is bring these like-minded people together, bring them together to exchange ideas, share ideas and create magic honestly.
Speaker 3:So we relaunched the London community earlier in 2023, and we run a number of events and the quality of conversations that we have and we all meet is just top notch and so many good things can come out of it. So our goal is to take, if you're making a difference in just a few people's life in the work, to help them create a better world of work. Our work here is kind of done and that's why I also went and started the launch of the Mumbai chapter, because I feel why not do the same in India? I must mention the Shaper Work community is doing fantastically fantastic work in India and I thought try and contribute in my little way by introducing this Mumbai chapter there.
Speaker 2:That's great. We are actually very glad that you are part of the shape of the world community here, also talking about your experience as UN Women UK delegate. In your capacity as a UN Women UK delegate, how do you advocate for women's rights and gender equality?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so again, I applied for this last year.
Speaker 3:It's an association from the part of the UN which only focuses on women empowerment and equal rights across the world.
Speaker 3:So it's an opportunity for women to kind of come together for about 8 to 10 days virtually and really discuss ways to really change things, to help women, give them better access to education, better access to employment, give them a voice and what. Through this initiative and I've been a part of I've really been able to connect with a lot of women across the world who are very much engaged and involved in creating this. So what I'm particularly really passionate about is really changing the situation for women at the grassroots level in India, because I think that's a pressing issue. They don't really have access to education, they don't have access to employment. So that's something I really tried to do by partnering with people within the Indian ecosystem it could be even small charities and making the small difference by going out there and mentoring young women or teaching young women certain key qualities that are required to survive in this world. So those are small bits that I'm trying to do in my little way to make a difference.
Speaker 2:That is really commendable. Also, are there any specific challenges or achievements you would like to highlight in this regard?
Speaker 3:with regards to the UN.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:I think there's just so much information out there. There's just, you know, for example, when I attended this last March, there was, I think, over 200 webinars or 200 calls virtual calls that we participated in. I mean, of course, I couldn't join all of them. So, you know, you have to kind of cut out the noise and really be focused on what you are really connected with. You know, because it's very easy to get distracted and you don't know then, yeah, I want to do this as well, I want to do this as well, and then what ends up happening? You won't end up doing anything really well. So I think it's really important to be a bit laser focused on what you're going in there for and trying to like work on that and make that happen.
Speaker 2:Definitely and what steps do you believe are essential for closing the gender gap in leadership positions, both with the organizations that you have come across as well as the organizations you have worked previously? Any insights you can give in this regard?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's such a minefield at that particular issue. It's a bit of a vicious circle. In my opinion, the only way to bridge that gap is hiring more women in leadership positions. But I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3:When I was trying to hire a director of QA with one of the companies I was working for, it was someone from my network, fantastic candidate, ace. All the interviews she was a female candidate and we were going to have one of our first female hires in the technology leadership space and she very politely refused, rejected the role and went for another business because there were not enough women in the leadership position in our business and she's like I don't want to be. I'm not quite sure if it's aligning with what I want to do the business goals. So it's like I said, that's why there's a vicious circle. The key is to go out there and hire more.
Speaker 3:The top leadership need to understand the importance of that and sometimes this could be a slightly controversial, unpopular opinion, but sometimes it's very important to ring fence certain roles and just make sure that we were disciplined about it and hire a female candidate for some of them because there's a. There are some fantastic candidates out there in the leadership position. It's just they don't get that opportunity because for various reasons and I think that's where ring fence in certain roles could be really good. Another way of doing it is just making sure there's a 50-50 gender, 50-50 ratio at every stage of the interview process, specifically when it reaches a final stage. Until that doesn't happen, you don't kind of fill the role. But these kinds of things sometimes of course they understand it's not possible when the companies are in a hurry or when resources are limited. So that's why it's important to strike that balance and it's important to do it from day one, so then you don't reach the situation in the first place.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and Grishma. If you could give one piece of advice to founders and leaders aiming to build high EQ teams in the startup ecosystem, what would it be?
Speaker 3:I think it's amazing when you guys are building something of your own and you'll start something with a fantastic idea. Just don't undermine the importance of the kind of people who will be coming into the business. It's very easy right in the beginning to do this in a bit of a hush-hush way and just hire quickly. But I think, create that right recruitment mindset, the recruitment culture from day one in terms of hiring correctly, so having an elaborate or detailed hiring process to make sure you're assessing every aspect of the role, because these are the people who are going to take your business from day one to year five maybe, and you want to make sure that they are really fit for purpose. So I think just getting that right recruitment culture from day one is very important. It requires more commitment, it requires more discipline, but the results are invaluable.
Speaker 2:Definitely Totally resonate with you there, Grishma. Thank you for taking the call today and sharing these valuable insights with us regarding the recruitment, the challenges you face, the strategies we can all implement to make our processes better, as well as showing us the side of culture that we should improve on and the practices that we should follow. Thank you so much for your time today, hoping to reconnect with you on more such topics in future.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, ibshita. Thank you for having me, and I really hope we can connect later as well on different topics. I'd love to do that.
Speaker 2:Definitely.