At the time, Keynote Systems had a workforce of about 300 as compared to Mainstream Advertising’s 100 strong employees. The stories surrounding the two situations are substantially different scenarios, although both took place during the current recessionary times.

Andreea spoke to us about how she saw the financial crisis impacting both organisations. During 2008 and 2009, Keynote Systems experienced a few rounds of layoffs, there had been salary reductions for both regular staff and senior management, and many of the otherwise usual expenses such as company-sponsored events etc, were eliminated or at least reduced drastically. Tensions were high, to say the least, and hiring was also frozen; in the rare circumstance of people resigning voluntarily, headcount was not replaced. Indeed, the company became very, very lean. Then, on joining Mainstream Advertising, Andreea found that company to be growing quite rapidly. Her challenge was really one of locating highly competitive talent. Advertisements were placed for the openings and resumes did indeed flood in. However, Andreea found that truly valuable talent, the only kind that they were after, were not the ones actively on the job market at the time. Instead, those employees would rather “stay put” and wait in their positions until the situation re-stabilised itself.

“I have noticed that the way in which businesses are initially trimming is really a classic case of organisational pruning, where they are getting rid of the employees who would have been terminated anyway during the next performance review. In other words, the valuable performers are being kept, while the obvious, under-performing overhead is being eliminated during the first stages of lay-offs. The reality is that the calibre of candidates is not as high as we would have expected, and trying to acquire high quality talent is both very hard and very expensive. So, I would argue that, being in growth mode, particularly during trying economic times, does present its own set of challenges, and those are precisely the times in which having a strong professional network can pay off considerably, in order to reach out to referrals and be able to attract talent that way,” Andreea explained.

HRM : How are you dealing with this talent issue?
Andreea : By going carefully through the LinkedIn connections, by attending meaningful industry conferences and trade shows to see if we can identify talent there, by working with our Marketing department and trying to focus on getting the name of the company out there and advertise it as being indeed the kind of workplace that fosters both incredible talent and superior products. It's about having an aggressive promotional plan and not cutting corners unwisely, which is usually the norm in terms of advertising during tough economic times.

HRM: What do you consider to be the main role that HR plays in your organisation?
Andreea : HR really does have a hands-on and take-charge role at Mainstream Advertising, and that is why I have accepted this role to begin with. It's very strategic and also appreciated and respected as such. HR here truly is part of the senior management team and gets involved in fundamental discussions encompassing processes implementation and measuring results as they relate to our business model.

HRM: Was it like this when you arrived or did you have some impact on this?
Andreea : When I joined it was a total void actually. I had to reinvent the department and essentially build it from scratch. Whereas I had the management team’s backing for strategies and processes implementation, the employees themselves were clearly not educated in what a modern HR department is responsible for. They would essentially come to me for vacation requests and salary increase proposals. The real fun for me began once I subtly started to work on refining the corporate culture from an HR perspective, and in essence define who Mainstream Advertising wants to be from a talent perspective. Believe me, it was a learning process for me as well!

HRM : What kind of HR trends have you seen develop in the last year in your organisation?
Andreea : Although I've only been with my current workplace for the past five months, I can only evaluate the current trend from a recession perspective. The hiring trend is really the most relevant one that we care about these days, followed by the trend of not only identifying appropriate talent, but also keeping them happy and retaining them long-term. Another important trend involves the issue of compliance. This is usually something we think of in relation to publicly-traded companies, but this is also an important issue that privately-held companies need to deal with. How you create compliance best practices and how you approach this with management really starts with an effective organisational structure. It involves fostering a culture of true teamwork and creating a diverse workplace. It involves designing effectively multi-disciplinary teams. When I think of best practices, I also think of communication, particularly in the sense of developing and conveying effectively ideas and information from the perspectives of both oral and written forms. It's about presentation style and training your managers to that effect. It's about creative thinking, that ingenious process of generating ideas and expressing them effectively, and which necessitates a certain kind of business education that should be originated from the HR department, and that in itself is a powerful trend that can be identified as of late in our field.

HRM : What kind of HR trends have you seen develop in the last year in your particular industry?
Andreea : Our industry - online media - is not advertising per-se, as much as it is technology. It is oftentimes cut-throat and in order to survive one really needs to be nimble and adapt to the new online advertising models quickly. There are quite a few companies providing online advertising services, so there's constant competition in terms of acquiring good engineers and product managers, for example, who may be tempted to leave to work for the competition. So, I would say that the trend is to work really hard and creatively to retain the employees. Is the movement all about more money? Oftentimes, it is not. With software developers in particular, it’s really about the intellectual challenge. They are artists with a mathematical mind, and the main focus should be to keep them engaged and excited about the creative flow. It's more than just visa requirements and more pay. It’s also about adopting a hands-off approach to let them do their work, while also gearing them towards a focused direction. These are employees with skills not easily transferable and they possess that artistic quality. It really takes a certain kind of personality to be able to manage them effectively and a certain kind of song to sing to them as well. And that in itself is a fascinating industry trend that we are dealing with.

HRM : In terms of compliance best practices, what aspects of compliance, in particular, are you looking at?
Andreea : Mostly in our industry, it’s about ethics, particularly since this is not an industry that is tightly regulated, and many rules come into play in terms of web traffic being (or not being) driven to clients. Looking at this issue from a corporate ethics perspective, there are things that can be done that perhaps shouldn't be done. Keeping that mirror above their heads and having constant and up-to-date ethics training is a large part of the compliance issue.

HRM : It is absolutely important to be able to measure the impact of HR initiatives on the achievement of business goals. How do you go about measuring this impact?
Andreea: It’s a complex process. The HR department, particularly the one in a technology firm, has a critical role to play. The responsibility starts with acquiring the right talent, and then having the appropriate training set up and the right processes and benefits as well, in order to retain the talent. The HR team needs to focus on key initiatives of talent retention, but it works effectively only if HR is connected at all levels and feels the pulse at all levels. We have to work to design the right solutions to get the right talent, and that has to be adapted to economic and industry-specific conditions. We have also established an employee referral programme. Its main aim is to motivate employees to contribute significantly to the business objectives, ensuring transparency so they are up to date with staffing developments, and implement these initiatives in order to do everything possible so the newcomers would feel welcomed, integrated from Day One, and meaningful contributors soon thereafter.

HRM : What sort of data collection methods do you use to determine operational and performance results?
Andreea: We look at and assess employee productivity, the impact of training, the impact of business mentors and training “buddies,” analyze the results of anonymous polls and surveys, and consider reactions to performance reviews. I also employ the Bradford formula in order to assess attendance and its impact on the business. Of course, finessing and assessing their reliability is an ongoing issue, because a variety of factors come into play when looking at this data, particularly since such a large psychological component is part of that analysis.

HRM : In order to see the impact of HR's role on how business goals are achieved, you need to work closely with the business. Do you see it as an imperative to understand the financials, the product lines and the sales/marketing effort and impact?
Andreea: This sort of question has come up often during meaningful strategic HR discussions over the past two to three years. The very short answer is actually quite simple: if you want to understand the true particulars and implications of the HR functions, then you really need to understand how to read balance sheets and financial projections, understand competition, creatively and effectively integrate its diverse departments, and how to make them grow (and not just from a personnel standpoint). In other words, it is imperative to grow out of the HR shell and expand the view following an interdisciplinary approach. It is also about not losing sight of the big picture and the large objectives and not get continuously side-tracked by purely administrative details.

HRM : How do you integrate your efforts more closely with other departmental units so that it’s a more cohesive structure and so that, ultimately, your impact and value is of greater significance?
Andreea: It’s very important for all, not just HR, to understand what’s happening within the other departments of an organisation. Too often, there is a battle going on in the background, with the misunderstanding that HR is a subgroup of Finance and Administration and therefore having the intrinsic value that it brings to the company questioned. How does the HR professional fight that prejudice? By proving that you know what you are doing, by understanding the business, by participating in the meetings that discuss what new products are being launched, by analysing the market and how the company positions itself in that space, by assessing the existing talent meaningfully. A truly cohesive structure can only be achieved when HR understands the nature of the other departments and their objectives and works on implementing on an ongoing basis effective communication and strategies amongst them.

HRM : What would you advise someone in HR who doesn’t currently have these kinds of relationships sewn up, but who believes in its necessity and wants to approach this whole issue with a view towards more HR value and contribution?
Andreea: When you get started in HR or are new in a company, realise that there’s a whole lot that you don’t understand, and that it’s fine. Go in with big dreams but be realistic in knowing that the changes you envision are not necessarily going to happen, at least not immediately. Try to first understand your job, then your department as a whole, and then the nature of the business and its intricacies. Proceed with establishing a good relationship with your supervisors. Continue to read HR books and periodicals, take HR courses, and slowly integrate yourself in the new corporate culture. Attend networking events and conferences so you can learn uninterruptedly. Read good industry blogs, start collaborating with peers, and when you become more comfortable, make connections on LinkedIn and beyond. Understand what the core values of HR are and network in your niche market, but also try not to become too restrictive in your approach.

And something that is worth repeating: never get bogged down by small HR details at the cost of losing sight of the larger picture and how to integrate that into the business and how to collaborate with the other departments. Don’t go to others to ask them to mentor you just for the sake of it. Sit down with people you look up to and absorb, but have a good reason to initiate conversations. Do your own research and have that continuous thirst for learning. Take a holistic approach; growing in your position is not a silver bullet, and it certainly does not happen overnight. There are many approaches to this, but the more thoughtful you are about it, the more you will succeed.