Daphne has over 10 years of diverse Human Resources experience. Daphne serves as Chief Human Resource Offer, Head of People strategy in Treal Technology. Her responsibility is providing strategic HR to align with the business goal. Daphne spent much of her career working in the industries such as high tech, telco, insurance and shared services environment including both established and new start up organization. Prior to taking on her current role, Daphne started her career as a HR Specialist and further to a  HR Business Partner. Her experiences focusing in people strategy such as talent management, performance management, learning and development, compensation and benefit, employee engagement and leadership coaching. Daphne is passionate to drive the changes of the people behaviour to boost the performance in achieving the business goals. Her philosophy in implement people strategy is “Develop a good culture and put the right people in the right job with the right skill, is how the people strategy works.

In an exclusive interaction with SCIKEY, Ms Daphne speaks about how they are building up their reputation and establishing themselves as a startup, the talent strategies they are using to attract talent and engagement activities that they perform to achieve business objectives.

Daphne, you Head People Strategy at Treal Technology, share some of the biggest challenges you faced in people management across the organization? What were some of the strategies you implemented to solve them?

Treal technology is a new startup that began in 2018. I joined this company in March 2019. Before I joined, the company had no proper culture setup, and there was no clear direction to go ahead. This reflected in the way they hired, resulting in people that come with different perspectives and character. We have now begun working on the culture and methods to diverse. The biggest gap I noticed after joining the startup was the huge gap between the management and the employees; in a way that employees were unaware of what the management was doing. So, to give them some direction, I along with the hiring managers, picked the team members who has been identified as the future leaders in the organization, to lead and cultivate.

We now hire candidates that share the same values as our organizations. We use Behavioral Interview Skill the interviews last for more than an hour. This is crucial to make sure that the candidates can adjust to the culture here. Since we are a startup, we need to grow faster. We need candidates who are creative and have an entrepreneurial mindset. To enhance our culture, we have the Open-Door Policy, and we also encourage our employees to be open with their opinions. In terms of creativity and innovation, we ask questions related to their previous projects. We do this to check their innovation skills. The next one is to check how much is the employee willing to help the client reach their goals. How driven are they to get the results? It should be the right balance between creativity and being able to execute it.

One of the HR Tech trends-2020 suggest, “Hiring is no more about recruitment, it’s all about Attracting” What is your take on this? Share with us some of the strategies that you have implemented to attract the right talent in your organization.

In the IT industry, the biggest challenge we have is, generation as the youth are always our target generation. We studied a lot regarding the organization and what they want. Today’s youth expect transparency from the company. Whenever I come in contact with candidates, I always tell them both the pros and cons of our organization. I do not want to set the wrong expectations for them.

We are still working on the branding of the company since we are just a startup. When we speak to candidates, we mention how we are a startup in the fintech industry, but they would surely be having a speedy career projection when they begin working with us. I want the candidates to know exactly who we are.

How do companies deal with talent acquisition in an era that is moving towards the gig economy?

After this year, we are planning to hire some more freelancers, since the gig economy workers are not limited to youngsters alone. We also do find older generations. Once we establish our company this year a little better, we will begin bringing in individuals on project basis. In some of our projects, we have hired freelancers, not in Malaysia but China. They have worked with us on a project for a year.

How does analytics aid HR leaders to align engage talent with business objectives?

I always try to align our business objectives. Before I had joined this organization, I had sent a set of surveys that asked about the good and bad they find in this place. This is because, if your competency has an issue, your KPI will too. I did realize that I have a lot to do here once I joined. When you are choosing for talent at least, it is essential to see if the candidate is aligned to your business objectives. Some leaders don’t know how to align KPI with business objectives. So what we do is first educate our managers on how to align them, and only then they can move further with other objectives. It takes us a lot of time to do this at work. As per engagement, we make sure that there are team activities to ensure that the team spirit is being built. Some employees take an active part in them, whereas some are passive. We encourage collaborations between teams.

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