Melissa Harper, VP Monsanto: TotalPicture Radio Transcript

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Melissa Harper is Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition and Diversity, with Monsanto Company. In this role, she leads global inclusive strategies for the end-to-end talent processes. This includes employment branding, university relations, direct and professional hires, diversity, as well as all the supporting strategies related to outreach strategies, metrics and reporting, strategic workforce planning, employee referral, and proactive talent sourcing. She joined Monsanto from being Senior Vice-President, Wealth Management Group Recruiting Manager, with the Wachovia Corporation.

Welcome to a special Talent Acquisition Insight Recruiting Podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from IACPR Global Conference in New York: The New Talent Management, Strategies for the Future, brought to you by Riviera Advisors. Melissa, thank you for joining us on TotalPicture Radio.

Melissa: Thank you, Peter.

Peter: What brings you to IACPR and what have you absorbed over the last couple of days here at this conference?

Melissa: Great. Thank you. As a long term practitioner in the talent space, this is my second year coming to IACPR, and I think it's a great gathering of practitioners and thought leaders in the talent space. That certainly is what brings me here and very excited to be here. I just take away tremendous value of applicable information that I can even take back and bring to our organization. I've enjoyed everything from the real life focus on the brand story as shared by Motorola.

Peter: That was interesting, wasn't it?

Melissa: Yes. What they had to do to engage and motivate and retain in a changing business. Again, very real for what we're dealing with in the changing environment today.

Peter: Today is really focused around diversity and I keep hearing lots of different perspectives, and I would certainly like to get yours. One happens to be that diversity is just baked into most corporations today. And so, it really isn't being discussed that much anymore. What's your perspective?

Melissa: Yeah, and I'm glad to see that. Certainly from our company, it is what's so woven into our people strategies, our human capital strategies that it kind of just is almost like safety is so embedded. I think, certainly, the recognition that, one, how globalization is impacting even the definition of diversity. So not in the purest sense of representation has been focused in the US. It's exciting to see how the definition is really broadening. That means that for companies that care about competing and winning in a global talent environment, we do have to be concerned about what does diversity mean for each individual organization. It's certainly not any longer a cookie cutter just based on representation. I'm glad that organizations are moving away from that.

Peter: Tell us a little bit about your role at Monsanto and Monsanto's attitude towards diversity at your global organization.

Melissa: My role at Monsanto, as the Vice-President of Global Talent Acquisition and Diversity, is really to ensure, first of all, that we have access to the best in broadest talent pools. By that, we certainly do mean that ensuring that that access includes an inclusive slate of great diverse talent. And so, that's the key role.

We look at diversity in terms of certainly that of thought, of experiences. As a pure agriculture company, that could even mean for us talent coming to us from different industries outside of having the experience working on the farm. Differences come in a lot of ways for us.

Peter: You viewed diversity as a strategic advantage in your organization?

Melissa: Absolutely. Diversity is a strategic, imperative strategic advantage. In competing to win in today's market, it definitely does correlate to how we partner and how we succeed as it relates to our customer base which, for us, that would be the great farmers or growers across the globe.

Peter: SHRM put out a study that they had conducted a survey on diversity. One of the statistics is in fiscal 2010, only 16% of organizations represented in the poll had a diversity training budget; 29% of the 16% had a separate standalone diversity training budget while 71% factored into the overall training budget. It seems, in this economic downturn, one of the first things that usually gets cut is training. So from your perspective and your organization, has your training budgets been maintained and are you training people in the area of diversity?

Melissa: That's a great point. Absolutely, our organization is training individuals as it relates to diversity and diversity management. We have consistently enabled all of our people leaders throughout our global corporation to participate in a training that, in part, focuses on how do you certainly lead and ensure that we'd enable the organization to focus on diversity and what that means for our company. So that training is a part of what we call our People Leadership Series and, fortunately, we have remained committed to that training within our organization.

There are also a couple of other key ways that we really just touched on it throughout our broad population. One is through mentorship programs. Another is through affinity network groups. Our organization has nine of those today. And then, thirdly and certainly finally, driving diversity from the top, having our CEO, our executive team, and our top leaders across the globe that we call our MAC (Monsanto Advisory Council), and we have a diversity subset of that that ensures that every business function has representatives at the leader level that participate on this diversity council, as another way to drive accountability throughout the company.

Peter: Thinking about the top of your organization, one of the presentations here this morning at IACPR was a very interesting glimpse into a financial services organization. Looking at specifically gender diversity, as you go further up the ladder, the male population really overcomes the female population. What is Monsanto doing to train and to promote especially women within the organization in senior leadership roles?

Melissa: Absolutely. Great question. Thank you. So internally, we're absolutely focused on looking at our development, our promotion rates as it relates to gender. We're able to really measure and follow how are we doing. At the end of the day where we make decisions that look into our succession plans, how are we driving decisions that certainly enable representation of our internal gender population.

Externally, we're also focused very intentional around our outreach, aligns to focus where we can increase gender representation again across the globe. And then, secondly, ensuring that we're being very proactive around our candidate pipelines, and that was touched on in today's conference as well. How are we not reactively – because there's a hiring need but everyday state, how are we looking at what are the best talent out there. And so, specifically, in terms of gender, how can we increase better gender into some of our critical talent segments such as sales or some of our scientific roles.

We've seen that proactive work and lens really does give us better results. A specific example I can think of is within India, year over year, by operating more with proactive sourcing pipelining, we've increased our women gender from 8% to 20%.

Peter: How does diversity factor into your recruiting process?

Melissa: Diversity is absolutely integrated into our recruiting process so much so that, for our organization, we have integrated corporate diversity for the company as part of talent acquisition, recognizing that there's certainly a huge opportunity to be more successful if those two organizations were integrated. And so, we were able to work with hiring managers, again, very proactively in terms of what are their organization needs in terms of being more balanced.

Peter: I interviewed Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, who's with Egon Zehnder, a couple of weeks ago. He wrote a book called Great People Decisions. One of the interesting things that his book brings out is that so many times in the hiring process, people try to hire individuals that they feel comfortable with, that's like them, right, which is not the way you want to hire them. You really want to bring in a diverse population which is going to bring a different perspective. At Monsanto, is that something that you look at in the hiring process, not going around in good old boy network and 'Oh yeah, well, this purpose really fits into the organization. He's just like me or she's just like me?' So do you look for these diverse points of view?

Melissa: Absolutely. That's a great question. We do have leadership competencies and behavioral competencies defined for the organization. And so, first and foremost, that gets woven into our selection tools and processes.

One of the great things about our organization that really is focused on innovation at the end of the day is that it's a great collaborative environment. And so, the hiring process, hiring decision, too, is very collaborative, and I think that the value of that does steer away from more of the group think dynamics that can happen within the selection process.

Peter: You know, one of the things that were discussed here yesterday as far as hiring, this whole dynamic around the CEO being able to hire whomever he or she would like to hire and overwriting everyone else in the organization. It seems there's a real trend against that type of hiring that, really, you need to have a consensus around the whole team. There really is a movement out there to try and hire better, right?

Melissa: Yes, absolutely. It's very exciting for me in this professional space to see that trend. Not that hiring managers out there aren't equipped but I think it's recognizing that the technical competencies are just one aspect but you certainly do have to hire and be better at predicting how can this talent continue to be nurtured by that culture but also bring value as well, well beyond just that initial role that you're hiring that person for. I think the broader and collaborative that those decisions are making, the better the outcomes will be.

Peter: Does Monsanto use executive search firms in their recruiting? Do you use staffing agencies? Do you use job boards? How do you go about finding the talent you're looking to bring into your organization?

Melissa: Yes to all of those. There's a number of ways that we go about sourcing for talent. One of the aspects and the key aspect is, internally, we've really built a model that enables us to really go out and source the great talent within our own recruiting teams supported globally in each of our major regions. So that includes certainly leveraging social media to following some of the thought leaders in the space and direct networks and employee referrals. But yes, there are also absolutely times that we do partner selectively with external retained executive search firms.

Peter: Are you active on LinkedIn and Facebook and do you tweet your jobs?

Melissa: Yes, we do tweet our jobs. We're active on a number of social media platforms today. That includes LinkedIn and Twitter. We're preparing for Facebook. It's that next generation for us. As well as, again, being a global company, looking at some of those social media platforms that are relevant in other regions.

Peter: Now, those social media functions, are those operated out of the HR Department? Are you using outside agencies to, for instance, build your Facebook page or are you doing all of this internally?

Melissa: We are doing it internally. We are building our employment branding strategy and model internally, partnering with an outside organization, but we're really equipping and enabling our recruiting teams, geographically, to support the social media usage internally. And then, those results then, for us, we find beneficial because it builds our own internal knowledge base, if you will, through a global system powered by Taleo that we use across the globe.

Peter: Something that was interesting in Michele Carlin's presentation yesterday – she's the Senior Vice-President of Human Resources at Motorola Solutions and their presentation on employer branding, the Motorola Solutions case study, I thought was fascinating and the fact that, at one time, they had hired professional actors to represent their employees and their customers in staged situations. Now they have transitioned into using real employees and real customers, and that seems to really be a trend now from the whole aspect of being authentic and transparent especially your employer branding that's going out there. In Monsanto, are you using real people especially in your employment branding and marketing?

Melissa: Absolutely. That is a great question in the Motorola example, yes. In our case, we are using real people – real employees, real customers, farmers that we go out to – and we find that our focus is really about how do we produce more, improve lives, and focus on sustainability ag. With that, we're really letting employees tell the story of a day in the life and what's it like to contribute at any level and any function within the company to that greater good for our grower customer or farmer customer. And so, you will see, in our employment branding, whether it's our career side or other recruitment collateral, actual pictures of real employees from the lab environment to a corporate setting environment.

Peter: Do you have particular issues in recruiting for specific roles within your organization, especially with 9.2 unemployment? A lot of hiring managers say, "Well, why can't you just go hire somebody tomorrow? There are so many people out of work." But hiring is really a tough job and it takes real discipline and skill to be able to do this. Are you finding the people that you need?

Melissa: Yes, it absolutely is tough. In my eighteen-plus years in it, I like to say that recruiting has never been as difficult and it's never going to get any easier for lots of reasons, right? Technology has been a game changer, globalization, etc. We, too, are challenged. Particularly, we're in an environment that focuses on – a lot of our opportunities are very niched in skill set that we're looking for; so PhDs in Agronomy or breeders. And so, we do really focus with our businesses, internally, to understand what are those critical talent segment needs of today and the future as best as we can predict and, again, really focus our energies around being more proactive at yielding those results. It's about the relationship. Again, going back to better results as it relates to even diverse talent, it's ongoing and it's about those networks and the relationships.

Peter: One last question, Melissa. Another very interesting session yesterday was all around the candidate experience. Paul Marchand from PepsiCo led that session. Talk to us about the candidate experience at Monsanto. Because so many candidates get so frustrated with the 'black hole' and they never hear back from anybody, are you working to make sure that when someone submits a resume to your organization that at least they'd get a 'thank you' e-mail or some kind of indication that they've got a pulse and you're hearing from them?

Melissa: That's right. The candidate experience is a key driver. No matter what the cycle in hiring that we're in, without question, it matters and it certainly does matter for us. One of the things that we're doing is certainly using technology as a way to ensure when candidates care enough to present their information to us that they hear back, and we use our technology systems to ensure of that, but the personal touch certainly ensuring that candidates that, again, take the time to meet with us and interview in person, that we're ensuring that there's timely and substantive feedback that they're getting. We're doing certainly what we can within what we can control to ensure that candidates know where they are in the process, understand the feedback, and are clear about any future expectations.

Peter: It seems that especially the companies here, which just the fact that they're here are rather enlightened compared to a lot of organizations, are really trying to create a conversation with candidates, and maybe that person isn't the right fit for that particular job but, "Hey, let's connect on LinkedIn. Let's stay in touch," and really create a relationship, right?

Melissa: Yeah, and that's what it's about, and I think, again, if they're not going to be a successful placement today, just the recognition that they can be a source or they can certainly be a customer. In a day of social media, people will voice, one way or another, how they feel about that experience. It does matter.

Peter: Melissa, thank you so much for speaking with us on TotalPicture Radio.

Melissa: Thank you, Peter, so much.

Peter: Thank you.

We've been speaking with Melissa Harper, Vice-President, Global talent Acquisition and Diversity at Monsanto Company based in St. Louis, Missouri. Our interview was recorded at the IACPR Global Conference in New York.

You'll find this podcast along with the complete transcript in the Insight Recruiting Talent Acquisition Channel of TotalPicture Radio. That's totalpicture.com

Please make a point to visit rivieraadvisors.com/podcasts for the monthly podcast series, Insights Amplified. You'll find a complete library of thought-provoking interviews on HR and recruiting, including the complete transcripts from these in-depth discussions with leaders in HR and recruiting at the IACPR conference. While there, please join the conversation with recruiting and staffing professionals on the Insights from the Riviera blog.

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This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.