Andrei brings a wealth of experience leading strategic talent acquisition and scaling high-growth tech companies. Before DATAPAO - a Data Engineering & Science consulting company, Andrei led tech recruitment in Wise - the fintech unicorn, and the people function of Shapr3D - the maker of the Apple-awarded Computer Assisted Design (CAD) product.
In Wise, together with his team, he grew the engineering team from zero to 500+ across five geographies (Singapore, Ukraine, Hungary, Estonia, and the US) while in Shapr3D he established the recruitment function from scratch and, later on, took over the People function. Before his start-up stint, he spent ~10 years in the corporate world, working across industries - from telecomm, to oil & gas, and railway & aerospace, always with a focus on recruitment and people development.
Time: 22 May, 11:50 - 12:15
Location: Manpower Room - 1st Floor
Talent Acquisition leaders rightfully think that TA should be a strategic function for the business. Despite that, their teams rarely "get a seat at the table" nowadays. The consequence?
TA struggles to thrive and add real value to the business
TA is labeled as a "backstage", "support", or "delivery" function
TA teams and leaders are frustrated, demotivated, and apathetic
Great talent is leaving the function in droves
But why is that? Why don't we get a seat at the table?
While we can point to many factors that are not necessarily in our control (e.g., market shifts, pandemics, etc.), scaling up a strategic TA function is in our control. And, unfortunately, the great capital squeeze in the world of tech (but not only) we experienced between 2022 and 2024 proved that we built TA functions that are anything but strategic. Looking back, we know now that:
TA contributed to scaling up financially unsustainable organizations
TA spurred a hiring frenzy that was doomed to fail
TA leaders built operation models that weren't scalable, robust, or resilient
But Talent Acquisition shouldn't be back-office. It should be navigation!
The role of TA is not to scale up organizations blindly. Our role is to scale up, from the driver's seat, sustainable organizations. In this talk, I will assert that in order to do so, we need to build strategic TA functions (for real!) and share a few tangible tips on how one can do so within different organizational set-ups
