Personal development tips for HR professionals

Advice for Maintaining a Strong Company Culture and Personal Development

Not only were we fortunate enough to have Dean Delpeache, Manager of Talent Acquisition at Fiix Software, on the panel at our recent Toronto event focused on managing evolving workplace demographics, but we have also been able to grab some time with him to dive into his experience, advice, and predictions.

From delivering a great candidate experience to maintaining a positive company culture as you scale, Dean covered it all with his smart and pragmatic advice for today’s HR and TA professionals.

Tell us about your role.

I am responsible for talent and recruitment at Fiix Software. My role comprises working with our HR Executive to create the talent strategy for the organisation, the pipelines we're going to use to source candidates, our candidate experience planning, and being apart of overseeing the onboarding process we offer.

In addition, I also participate in training, government grants, and I partner with our CSR Manager on diversity & inclusion initiatives. So, there’s quite a lot on my plate!

What do you love most about working at Fiix Software?

We are a purpose-driven company. We are not just building software because we want to make money, we are actually doing it because we want to make a real impact on the planet. Our goal is to make digital transformation a reality for every maintenance team. When maintenance teams move from pen and paper systems to tracking their maintenance operations with a CMMS, they increase productivity and lessen their environmental impact on the communities they interact with.

We are also very volunteer-driven. We give back to the community. We have a real vision, and we have great people with very talented minds that are amazing to work with.

How would you describe the company culture?

Our culture is very open and collaborative. This comes from our co-founder, Marc. He has successfully started a number of companies and has put the very best of his learnings into this company, and it really shows in our culture.

Maintaining a healthy culture and finding the best talent is important to us at Fiix. A homogeneous organisation is a great way to start building, but you need to turn it into a heterogeneous organisation to continue to grow. Diversity is extremely important, and that's one of the things that we've started to incorporate. What we're seeing now is all of these diverse minds coming into our organisation with different innovative thoughts, which is now exploding our growth in ways that we didn’t think of.

I really believe that is a part of what drives organisational growth, continuing that path, creating heterogeneity, and really driving diversity, which does wonders for productivity and performance.

What does a successful hiring process look like to you?

I think a few things roll into this and everyone will have different perspectives about it. I believe if you really put the candidates first and ensure that they have a great experience, you can create an amazing process for people.

It starts with an understanding of the type of experience you want your candidates to have. The candidate experience is one of your greatest points of building community within the tech ecosystem. The reality is, in Toronto especially, you have so many companies coming here who are hiring software developers, so why will they choose you?

If you think about it logically, you probably reject more candidates in your interview process than you hire candidates. That's just the reality. By creating an amazing candidate experience from your initial process of posting the job description and explaining who you are, all the way through to the interview process, then, even if you reject them, they can still endorse your company. You have created, as your NPS scores would have, a promoter of your organisation and that's valuable. I would love to have 80 promoters who didn't get the job but are out there speaking positively about their experience with Fiix Software.

What's your team's number one priority for the next six months?

Well, this answer is twofold. We are scaling in terms of our product, so the biggest part is hiring software developers, from an overall standpoint. An underlying priority is also our commitment to growing our female employee base from 34% to 40% this year. This goal has been agreed upon through our leadership and is something that I have direct responsibility for when hiring new talent into the organisation, so it’s something we think about on a daily basis.

What will be the biggest industry trend be in the next 12 months?

Well, when I go to conferences, the biggest thing they talk about is AI, and how to use AI for recruitment - I don't know if that's going to be the next 12 months, I just know that's what everybody's trying to talk about.

For us, it is how to improve candidate experiences and knowing what tools will be effective for this. Therefore, I predict the trend of “tools to help.”

One type of tool needed on the market is a machine learning software that assists recruiters to help tell the candidate story in a resume not just identify key words. I have heard of some tools that are trying to achieve this but are currently in early stages. Tools like this will help save time and will be effective for the future of recruiting.

What would be your top three personal development tips for HR professionals?

Tip number one - get to know yourself! Get to know your strengths, get to know what you're passionate about, especially in the area of HR so you can be more productive, and more performance oriented for your employer or yourself.

Tip number two - be a part of the community. Get to know other HR representatives. There are so many things that happen in our line of business, that if you're honest with yourself, you don't have the answer for but if you build up a community of people that you can reach out to, maybe someone else might have the answer for it. No one's asking you to be a genius.

Tip number three - understand your business strategy. Know this so that you can have a well carved out HR strategy that's effective. Because, at the end of the day, we all have results to achieve. And even if you have your own business, you have results. And so it's really important to have an HR strategy that aligns with the business strategy.

If you want to hear more from Dean Delpeache, make sure you keep an eye out for our upcoming blog on the key discussion points from our recent event in Toronto, to discover his views on managing evolving workplace demographics.

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