Reimagining the Future of Talent Acquisition: Lessons from Siemens’ 2030 Vision

Dimitri

Welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation Podcast. Today we have Salma Rashad, the Executive Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Siemens. Salma, how are you?

Salma

I’m doing great. How are you?

Dimitri

Wonderful. Good, good. I’m doing good. So, Salma, you are, relatively new at Siemens by the Siemens standards, I would say, right? About a year and a half there. Is that right?

Salma

Yes, indeed. I joined in 2023, and Siemens is a longstanding company. So, I am definitely relatively new compared to a lot of my colleagues.

Dimitri

Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure. But before we go into talking a little bit about Siemens, give me a little bit of your background. How did you end up in talent acquisition?

Salma

Well, I started my career in HR, as a business partner, as a generalist. And I always found myself getting involved in recruitment, tasks, activities, projects. There was something for me, I think about that proximity of working with the business and also working with external candidates to find roles. So somehow, slowly, I progressed, from being a generalist into a specialist.

And I have to say, I never looked back. Talent acquisition is one of these functions that is always changing. It’s a very dynamic function. So, I never felt bored in talent acquisition.

Dimitri

Would you say that talent acquisition is the tough spot to be in in HR?

Salma

In my opinion, yes. It’s, it’s a big challenge, but very rewarding, I find. I always like to think that it’s the closest to the sales organization if we think about it from a business standpoint because you’re out there finding candidates, closing deals, negotiating. So, it requires a very different skill set, which, frankly, suits me very well.

Dimitri

And so, you’re coming into an engineering company, a technology company. You were in pharmaceuticals before, is that right?

Salma

Yes, that’s correct. I had the pleasure to work across a number of different industries and that’s not something I was actually keen of at the beginning because, there’s sort of an understanding that you should become an expert in a specific industry, but I challenged myself around that and I have to say I definitely would not have done it differently because having seen talent acquisition executed in a number of different industries really allows me to bring a different perspective to this role.

Dimitri

Let’s talk about Siemens then. So, you come into a tech company. Siemens has changed a lot in the last 5 or 6 years, right? They’ve spun out the energy business. They’ve spun out the health care business. They’re focusing on the industrial technology area. I think you still make trains, though. Are you still making trains?

Salma

We do. Siemens has such, a long history and heritage, and I think that’s what makes it unique. It’s not really comparable with other technology companies per se, because its history inception is obviously different. So that’s where I think the ambition today is very clear. I think we have all an understanding that we want to become a one technology company.

We want to be able to leverage the scale that Siemens has, the products, the innovation to deliver faster growth, better innovation cycles and closer proximity as well, to the customers. So, I think that’s a very exciting proposition. And to see that and be part of that transformation is very unique.

Dimitri

And when you go to market, and your technology is a lot of industrial, automation-type technology, the average consumer doesn’t experience that technology directly, right? So, if you go to market as Google, you say, I’m a tech company and everybody says absolutely. But you go to market as Siemens recruiting and some people might say, no, you you’re an engineering company, you’re not a tech company.

So how are you thinking about the brand? And you have to reposition this brand very specifically now for recruiting. And how far along that journey are you?

Salma

I think when we think about Siemens, I agree with you. There are certain, connotations from a consumer product standpoint. But what we have observed, through research, through focus groups, through a lot of channels, in terms of analysis, we’ve seen a shift in terms of perception. We see that very clearly in the number of roles we have in technology.

We see that in certain markets where we are not well positioned or maybe well-known, frankly speaking, versus other competitors. So rather than taking just one broad approach, thinking that this is going to work everywhere, we’re looking at markets where we need to do an additional effort. Because we know that there are certain markets where we are very well positioned in that front, according to the rankings and research. But our focus really needs to be in the markets where we have to close that gap now.

Dimitri

So, did you when you came into Siemens, what was your first instinct? What did you do first? Did you go around and meet with hiring managers in these different business units and try and figure out what their challenges were? Tell me about that. How you came into the company?

Salma

Yeah, I think one of the things that I did was to do a listening tour, so that drove my assistant a little bit crazy because I had so many, hiring managers and business leaders to talk to. And my idea was just to listen. Obviously, I was brought in for a reason. I have talent acquisition expertise, experience.

But it’s really important to understand the context, the culture, the psyche before going out and starting to do things and bring new ideas. And that listening tour, actually, has been fantastic because it has helped me uncover a lot of the areas that we are focusing our strategy on now.

I think it’s always easy for a new leader to come in and kind of say, well, nothing really has worked in the past. Here is my new idea. But, actually, it’s much harder to recognize what this organization stands for and the certain good things that are happening. So, whether we want to scale these solutions, which we have excellent pockets of best practices or whether we want to evolve them and bring in new ideas. That’s where the magic happens.

So, for me, that listening tour helped me to anchor myself into the Siemens culture. So, to be in a position of strength to present our strategy and ideas for TA.

Dimitri

Okay. And you were talking globally. So how many countries are we talking about here? Every country, almost every country in the world.

Salma

Yeah. The scope is quite big. But on the other hand, the way that I see it is there needs to be collaboration between what the Global Center of Excellence does and what the local country to operations and business operations do. And that’s where I have worked in models where it was a top-down approach.

The center is driving everything. I’ve worked in other models that were very much decentralized models, but Siemens is somewhere in between. And that’s where the co-creation journey that we’ve been and we’re going through at the moment is allowing us to create glocal solutions.

Dimitri

Right, right. And, and so now you’re building your team globally. What’s that experience like? Are you, is it going to take you… How long is it going to take you to be where you want to be? Do you know yet?

Salma

So, the good thing is, when I think about talent acquisition, talent acquisition is part of talent management and our people and organization strategy globally. So, I don’t see that as a silo in itself. The way that we’ve set up our P&O strategy, it’s taking us to 2030. So, we have set certain ambitions around that. And that gives us the opportunity to deliver on these ambitions.

So, there are certain, steps that we’re taking now from setting the foundations to make sure we have a strong core of operations. And there are certain things that are going to take us longer. There are certain things around operating model transformation, shared services capabilities, around talent segmentation. And everybody is talking today about skills.

How to acquire these hard-to-fill roles and how to acquire these business-critical skills. And that just doesn’t happen in a silo into. So, we need to work together with our talent management colleagues, with our P&O business partner organization to make sure we understand what we are looking for in the market.

And based on that, obviously create the right level of strategies for the organization.

Dimitri

Right. Right. So, I noticed that Siemens was ranked, by Forbes for 2024, for…

Salma

Women in employers.

Dimitri

As an employer. Yes. Tell me about that a bit, because that’s pretty tough in tech and even tougher in what I would call traditional engineering.

Salma

Yeah. That’s, that’s true. And I think I see it in a number of different ways. On a, on a professional level, coming into Siemens looking at, all the different diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that we have, the mentorship programs that we have give us a very strong indicator that the business takes this as an important imperative. This is not a nice to have thing to do.

But also, I take it more on a, on a personal level because I experience that every day. I have a daughter, and I have a son, and I actually last week brought them to the office in Zurich in Switzerland. And they had a chance to spend the day.

And I was really excited to see how my daughter could, at 11 years old, be interested in AI and being exposed to the different technologies. So, there’s something about creating that excitement. Yeah. Early in the journey. And that is part of the culture.

A company like Siemens, that has been around for such a long time, more than 177 years. The basis needs to be innovation and agility, and without diversity, we are not able to bring that to life. But we do have a lot of, opportunities and initiatives where we are bringing, coding camps to children sponsored by Siemens. And that allows them early on to test these hypotheses. Do they like it? Do they enjoy it? What does it actually mean for them? And that’s where I see an important role that we play with society. So, that’s not only about just attracting talent for our company, but this is also bringing the skills that we need for the future workforce.

Dimitri

Right. So, you have some resources coming into Siemens that some people that run talent acquisition don’t have because you’re coming into a very big and maybe top, in terms of tech, top 10 tech company. You have the ability to address people in high school and build programs and connect with society in a way that smaller tech companies might not have the capability to do. How are you thinking about your generational strategy?

Salma

I think we’re starting to think about that from a talent attraction standpoint and we had certain discussions around Gen Alpha already, their preferences and how they consume information. So, all of that is important to us to start anticipating some of these generations coming into the workplace. But we also see that in our role in society and sometimes that role might not be very visible in certain places.

I remember discussing with one of my external peers in the US. Her son is studying in one of the top universities engineering and she was telling me that, “Yes, they are using this software in the university” and so on. And I was like, “Are you sure, is that a Siemens software?” And she wasn’t very sure actually. Then she ended up coming back to me and saying, “You know what, it actually is a Siemens software.” So maybe sometimes it’s not a very well-known fact about where we play and our impact, but we are certainly very conscious about the possibility of creating that impact early on.

Dimitri

So, you’ve talked a lot about the next-gen manager, the type of person that you want to be leading in leadership roles, you know, inside your organization, are you creating an archetype? Are you experimenting with, with what kind of person is going to be the next leader inside of Siemens?

Salma

I think we’ve moved away from that narrative of what the perfect leader looks like and adopted more of a of a of a growth mindset and more of a culture of empowerment. So, we see, considering the transformation that Siemens is going through, there are two types of leaders, more or less. One that are certainly involved in the bigger workstreams, of that technology, being one technology company ambition. So certainly, we see organizational development and change management capabilities being an important component of that.

On the other hand, we have many line leaders, thousands of line leaders who need to run the day-to-day operations. And that’s where team effectiveness is important. People experience is important. So that’s our philosophy when it comes to, leadership and leaders who transform as we like to articulate that around our P&O ambition.

Dimitri

Right. So, you’re sort of looking at your candidates, too, and you’re trying to figure out, what it is that they do best, right? And sort of work them into the organization based on what their talents are.

Salma

Yes, indeed. And considering, again, the volumes that we deal with, our teams are always looking at ways to bring in, assessment strategies, that help us and allow us to select these leaders. So, we have been experimenting with a number of different ideas, tools, around that. But we also want to bring more thinking around what the team composition is looking like.

So, the leader as an individual, but the leader also within a context of a team. How does that look like?

Dimitri

Yeah. Well, I think generationally what we’ve discovered is that the idea of what a leader does in the younger generations is very different than what the idea was for maybe my generation. My generation was very top-down, I think we inherited top-down from the people above us when we came into the organization. And, you know, the younger generation is not as interested in top-down leadership.

So how are you thinking about how that new behavior comes into an organization that you know has… Again, I’ll go back to like a Google. It’s a 30-year-old company. Okay. I mean, there was nobody there, in 1996 at all. There was no room, right? To, you know, to a big engineering company that’s been around for 100 and some odd 170 years, maybe, I’m not sure exactly how many, but something like that. And probably historically a very top-down management structure. You know, that now is giving way to a new way of doing things.

Salma

Yeah. One particular way of doing new things is actually we’ve moved away from performance management. So that is not a once in a year activity anymore. But we’ve replaced that with growth talks. That’s what we, call it here at Siemens. So, this allows us to have a different type of conversation between manager and our people.

It can also be initiated, actually, by the person. So, it’s not only top down, but the employee can also, raise their hand and just say, I want to have a growth talk with my manager, okay. And that is just an example of how we evolve to adapt to these preferences. So, for sure, there are a lot of, I would say, examples that we can bring at Siemens.

But one of them that really stood out for me was the growth talks, because that’s not something I’ve actually experience in other companies.

Dimitri

So, you have a recruiting team that has to tell these stories to candidates. How do you get all your recruiters to understand these stories and be able to paint this picture to candidates? Do you sit around with them and talk about story lines, talk about the way you position this with prospects.

Salma

So, we certainly have a big challenge because our teams are decentralized. So, it means that we need to get the message out to a number of different groups. So that is a challenge in itself. However, the way we’ve approached it is, first of all, we have to create a clear narrative. We have to all describe what does good look like for us, articulate that, share that, deploy that, keep repeating that. Because we know that’s very important, especially in the recruitment function. Sometimes you have attrition. People come and go. So that that needs to be present.

The second thing I would say is a very clear approach of upskilling. So, this is not only about just cascading the messages and saying, “You need to be saying these things.” But actually, creating learning opportunities and learning paths that bring that to life.

We are also in the position now, to launch something more specific for TA leaders. So, we’re doing a TA leaders lab, which will allow us to double down on some of these skills with these leaders, because we know that they are the enablers at the end of the day with their teams, on a day-to-day basis.

So that strategy will allow us to tackle these messaging and deploy them into the organization. And I would say in a sustainable manner, because I have observed in certain companies it’s a big, huge effort. And we do that at the launch of a transformation, for example, and then it just fizzles out.

So how do you also keep that in a sustainable way? How do you sustain this effort? How do you become consistent. That’s where that consistency pays off because it becomes part of the of the behavior and that’s where we want to get at.

Dimitri

So, besides training recruiters, are you evaluating recruiters on their ability to deliver this message. And then sort of saying, “Okay, you’re not quite there yet that that your story’s not a good enough story. So, you have to go back and work on that.” And maybe somebody else, the story is, well, fantastic out of the box. Sometimes that happens, you know. How much do you look at the across the team and try and figure out who’s there and who’s not there?

Salma

Well, we want to think more about the, the results of that. And how does it actually translate into hiring, better NPS scores, both from hiring managers as well as from candidates. And a big part of the focus of our TA strategy is actually creating exceptional experiences. This is something that we have, and we are embedding in our approach from a global standpoint, and that will help us shift our mindset around, my goal is to create exceptional experience. My goal is to make sure that the candidate, no matter what the outcome, is for the candidate, will turn around and say, you know what? I didn’t get that job at Siemens, but that was an amazing experience.

Dimitri

That, “I’s go back and interview again.”

Salma

Exactly, exactly. And that’s that I think is not only just upskilling, but that also means that we need to create systems and ecosystems and processes that enable the recruiters to actually be able to deliver on that promise. And that’s a long game that we are playing.

Dimitri

How many hiring managers are we talking about here? First of all, about just about like…

Salma

Oh, wow. That’s a good question. I mean, considering we fill more than 30,000, hires a year. Okay. So, I would say, yeah, it’s,

Dimitri

Maybe, maybe 5,000 – 10,000 hiring managers.

Salma

Possibly. Yes. So, there are there are different ways that we, we can talk about it because we have mature teams, I would say at Siemens, seasoned teams as well. We’ve gone through a number of different transformations. And certainly, we’ve been able to deliver as a recruitment function. So, there are a lot of good things happening, and it’s always about for us how do we take things from good to great?

Dimitri

And that takes time.

Salma

It takes time. But you have to have that as a North Star. And you have you have to think about it as something that not only an aspiration and nice to have, but how do you actually bring this to life for recruiters? Because I see a lot of nice slogans and nice aspirations. But if this doesn’t translate into tangible ways of doing things and doing things differently using technology, enabling, enablement of recruiters, then it just becomes a lot of hot air.

Dimitri

Figuring out how to be very strategic for the business is not trivial, right? The business would like to think that the market has everything they need. Okay. And the recruiter often gets stuck trying to explain that the market doesn’t have, what we need. How do you deal with that? And how do you coach your team to, to deal with that type of situation?

Salma

I think that’s the eternal question that we have in talent acquisition. And that’s what makes it exciting. So, I see it in two folds. There is a recruiter role, but there’s also hiring manager role in the process. So, we do invest as well in hiring manager trainings. That allows us to explain market dynamics, for example, that allows us to explain what a good process looks like.

Because sometimes even if we find the purple squirrel, yeah, if we sit on that purple squirrel for, for maybe even one week, it’s too late. So that’s where that work with the hiring manager needs to be very time, very close. And we talk about TA as a team sport. That this is not only on recruiters to deliver, but it’s also on the hiring manager to work with the recruitment team to be able to get the best candidate.

So, I see it as a as a really to two folds here. The recruiters’ role plus the hiring managers’ role here.

Dimitri

Yeah absolutely. I mean the recruiter can only go so far without the hiring manager. And how do you work? You know, the recruiter tells a certain story. The candidate goes in, they meet hiring managers. Very important that the story is consistent. Right?

So how do you look at that afterwards? Do you look at the candidate experience and do a deep dive on people that have come through the organization? How was your experience? When did it change? You know, not just surveys, but do you actually sit down and talk to candidates that succeeded in getting through the process?

Salma

So, I think the best stories are the data-driven stories. So certainly, we are very fortunate because we sit on a lot of data, but sometimes we are not very good at using that as part of the storytelling. And that’s where I see my aspiration here for us as a function, at Siemens, to leverage more of the data and work with partners that allow us, to leverage the data.

So certainly, there are a number of different KPIs that we can bring to the table. I can also think about how we are leveraging talent market intelligence. As part of that story, because we do receive huge number of applications, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to means we have hundreds of viable candidates. Actually, we don’t. And that requires us to be able to have a clear business acumen to understand how to go through these CVs.

What does good look like for this role? How do we bring the data to the table when we’re talking to hiring managers? How do we do, in certain teams, retrospectives about how the recruitment happens and talking to one of our TA country leaders, they mentioned to me that they actually bring in a hiring manager to do that retrospective with their own team.

And that, I think, brings a different level of credibility because it’s just not only about us looking at the data and seeing what the data is telling us, but that human voice and that voice over brings a different perspective to that retrospective. And the goal is to make sure that we are incorporating the feedback for the next round, for the next cycle.

That’s how, again, working in an agile inspired way, as I like to say, it will allow us to improve the function.

Dimitri

Yeah. And are you also thinking about working with talent management to figure out. How well your hires have done inside the organization? And are you using that data then to adjust who you’re recruiting or how you’re recruiting, or is it too early for you to be sort of at that stage yet?

Salma

Well, we monitor a number of different, I would say indicators, of course, attrition rates, attrition rates of new hires. And as we at Siemens don’t have performance management, so we don’t have performance management ratings, for example, that is typically used, I would say to evaluate quality of hires.

But we do have strong collaboration, I have to say, between our analytics team, our talent management team, small example of, what I mentioned. We’re looking at, the skills approach and the skills taxonomy. So, there’s definitely a lot of collaboration that’s happening. Across between the, the functions at the moment.

Dimitri

Are you, are you fully satisfied with where you are on skills yet or use transitioning? A lot of companies are transitioning to a skills-based taxonomy and as skills as a currency within, the organization. How far along that journey are you right now?

Salma

We are in the same, boat, I would say so we are in that transition state at the moment, and I do exchange with a lot of, external colleagues. And I think we’re all in different stages of that journey. I’m not sure whether there’s somewhere that have completely nailed that piece. But we do have certain, examples where we have deployed solutions for skills-based hiring.

And are these solutions scalable? Not yet. That’s what we are testing. And that’s where I believe it’s important to start small. Don’t create the big bang, straight away, but find the right use case and find the right opportunities to test these hypotheses before you go out and, and make a bigger investment, which is actually what we have been doing in talent acquisition.

Dimitri

Okay. And, and let’s, let’s just throw in AI here because no conversation would be… Artificial intelligence. And we could approach it from, I guess, many different angles. But obviously, Siemens as a tech company, has to go deep into artificial intelligence and, there’s probably a lot of demand for AI expertise. There’s obviously more demand in the market than there is supply. That’s probably going to stay that way for the next five years, if not longer. How are you dealing with that anxiety within the management team?

Salma

I guess the good news is that it’s not all on TA’s shoulder, so we do not see that the only way of doing that is just acquiring these skills. But we are investing heavily in upskilling and reskilling, and that, I think, distributes nicely that pressure across the learning organization, the talent management organization, and even the businesses themselves are heavily invested in that.

The other component I would say is, I’m seeing a lot of experimental action happen internally because for sure, one thing is knowing that we need that, but what do we need it for and where do we need that? And what type of skills, what does that actually look like in our Siemens environment?

So, I think that internal experimentation is allowing us to better refine our thinking around what the skills look like, where do we need them? And from there, whether that is an acquisition strategy, or this is, you know, build or a buy, there are different ways to go about it.

And we, we see Siemens very actively engaged externally in acquisitions of other companies. And these are also ways for us to, to strengthen our portfolio.

Dimitri

Yeah. Well, a year and a half in, you seem pretty excited, pretty fired up.

Salma

Well, believe it or not, our business conference title was ‘Supercharge’ so I’m really carrying that energy with me and it’s hard not to because you look around and you see this company with this amazing heritage, amazing portfolio, amazing potential and ambition. And me being here and playing part of that in that journey, it’s just very exciting.

Dimitri

Well, isn’t that so key within the talent acquisition team too, because it’s not just the story, right? The candidates immediately start evaluating the company based on how excited the recruiter is to be in the company and that’s their first real test, you know, because you’re another human being and just how much do you believe in what you’re telling me.

Salma

A lot of it is around the credibility that we bring to the table. I don’t see it, and our teams don’t see it as pure sales what they’re trying to do but there’s’ a very strong conviction. One of the things we talk about in our value proposition is around purpose because a lot of this technology has a lot of impact on our day-to-day life, on our societies, on sustainability. So, for sure there’s a different story, they’re not creating solutions for chatting or… they are really changing society. So, when we talk at Siemens that we transform the everyday for everyone, that’s something that we truly believe in.

Dimitri

Well, you seem very excited. I wish you the best of luck there. I’d love to have you back when you’re at your three-year mark, maybe. And you can look back at the whole entry into Siemens, and, great. Good luck there.

Salma

Thank you very much. Was a pleasure.

Dimitri

Thank you.