Hello social media followers, LinkedIn, Facebook, and everyone tuning into our show. Welcome to Beyond the Offer podcast. I am your host, Bill Gates and joined by my co host and friend, Rosanna Snediker. Thank you for tuning in as we tackle the latest trends and challenges in talent acquisition and human resources.
I am pleased to be joined by Tonya Wallach, who is our head of human resources at Broadstreet Impact Services, which is a financial services company offering fund management and fund administration services to their clients. Tonya has led HR at Kraft Foods, Abbott, University of Chicago, and the U.S.
Soccer Federation. Tonya is a pioneer in HR and the talent space and has excellent experience transforming companies’ HR departments and their cultures. I have known Tonya for what? About 12 years. And even though, well right around 10 years. Even though she turned down our offer with one of our clients about that 12 year mark , we still remain close today.
We are thrilled to have you join our podcast. Tonya, welcome to Beyond the Offer. Couldn’t be happier to be here. Hi, Bill. Hi, Rosanna. So happy to join you this morning. We appreciate your time. Well to kick things off, what led you to a career in HR? Did you always want to kind of pursue a career in human resources or how did that get started?
No, I did not always want to pursue a career in human resources. In high school, I was pretty sure I was going to be a CIA agent or work for the State Department. So my mom reminds me all the time- I did, I grew up in a small business in Michigan and I also did junior achievement in Michigan.
And so I had HR and marketing roles in those small companies in high school and I would come home and complain to her about HR and say, it’s just hiring and firing and telling people what to do to follow rules. I am never going to work in HR. So now she laughs. But I had a really naive perspective I think, based on a limited amount of information about what HR really can do.
And what changed that was just having a lot of really amazing learning experiences over time and kind of saying yes to those opportunities as they came. So I went to the University of Michigan Undergrad, got a Bachelor in business administration and made my way to Chicago, a city I’d always wanted to be in. And took a job as a consultant with Arthur Anderson’s middle market consulting firm and did business process reengineering for quite a while and got the chance to go out to their training center and teach new hires
business process reengineering. Sort of fell in love with it and really found I had a knack for breaking down information, teaching it, connecting with learners, and really wanted to pursue something in that space next. So spent some time at the University of Chicago, helping turn around their business essentially, doing big scale culture change and being part of a team where we took their school from number 11 in the business week rankings to number 1 in 4 years. Really proud of that work and the work behind it with that team.
I got a graduate degree while I was there, not at the University of Chicago, but at Northwestern. And had some great opportunities and learning. And part of that was meeting a mentor who was the head of organizational development at Kraft Foods. And she said, why don’t you come, make the jump and we’ll see where this goes.
And I did, and I got so many great opportunities to learn about talent management and how a talent team operates and what they do for an organization. And I got to lead some talent development projects globally. And when the organization split in two, talk about that later Bill. But when the organization split into two, it was an uncertain time, and they divested its North American business and they welcomed me to be part of the talent team, a small team that was going to reset the culture.
And so I got to build a corporate university. I got to build a high potential leadership development program. And all of this was awesome work. After Kraft got bought by 3G, which is a private equity firm, I took a role at Abbott, which is a medical devices firm, and I found myself wondering kind of what’s next.
I feel like I’ve done this before. I’ve done leadership development and there’s all these pieces of talent that I haven’t touched or HR. And I took some time off to really think about what is it that I want to do. And I just felt like all of the things that I’d been doing really helped set me up for success as an HR leader at the top of the house.
So building culture at Kraft, coaching leaders at Chicago booth, and then building efficient structures and processes at Anderson, those were all great building blocks for a fit for a head of HR. So I’ve gotten to do that twice. I’ve got to build HR functions both at U.S. soccer and now at Broadstreet Impact and partnering with leadership and the board to build the HR strategy, people process technology, and yes, policies- telling people what to do and what they can’t do, that drive organizational success.
So HR much more than hiring, firing, making employees follow rules, much more about making sure that the right people are in the right jobs at the right time. Absolutely. Yeah. You’ve been with some companies. I mean, Kraft Heinz, obviously massive, right?
I mean, Abbott, same way. You know, Broadstreet, U.S. soccer federation, much smaller employee populations. I mean, U.S. soccer was what, 100, 200 and Broadstreet’s about how many employees roughly now? We are under 50. I mean, Kraft Heinz is at what, 50,000 plus, if not more? 100,000 globally.
There you go. So, I guess the question I have is really more. How do you approach leading HR differently with given the employee population size? And I’m sure just your HR team is obviously significantly smaller as well. It is. In big organizations you have the scope and the recruiting for jobs is a lot different, right?
So you’ll have job descriptions in large companies that are very calibrated to the level of the job. Like you are going to manage and lead and that’s a significant portion of your job. In smaller companies you don’t have that luxury. We have what we call working managers. And those folks have responsibilities that might be much lower than what’s actually in their job description because you don’t have as many people to do the work and you can’t afford just to add headcount.
So in smaller companies, you might spend a lot of time working on the five year strategy at the beginning of the week. And then in the middle of the week, you’re ordering lunch for everybody because you brought everybody in for a team meeting. And then the end of the week, somebody’s calling you because
the lights don’t work and they can’t get a hold of the building. So it’s really different in terms of the scope of the jobs, which means there’s a really different and profound difference in how you recruit for those roles and those companies and the kinds of people that like to work in them. Very different.
Oh yeah. Does it feel more like- at Kraft I see more of like a cog in the- I mean, not cog in the wheel necessarily, but like obviously you’re approaching who you’re hiring different because industries, of course, there were a lot different as well. I mean, did it feel a bit different where you weren’t delegating as much and you had to roll up your sleeves a lot more in the smaller companies?
Yes, in smaller companies you absolutely have to roll up your sleeves and do a lot more yourself. I’ll give you for instance, the vendors and the technology partners and the processes are really different in big and small companies. If you’re in a big company like Kraft and you want to do an engagement survey, you say, “Oh, I’m going to call Gallup.
Because Gallup is the standard and we have enough people to justify the spend” right? In a small company like Broadstreet, you call up a Gallup and the spend is not worth it. You can’t justify it. And so you’ve got to find a different vendor, partner, or different way of doing things or do it yourself, to get the same results.
We at Broadstreet did a project where we pulled our HR, all of our HR technology and processes and policies in house. And instead of getting work day, we ended up working with a PEO of an outsourcer called Inspirity. And they did not have a link to the 401k we wanted to use, which was a small company called Betterment.
And so we created a manual process that links the 2 of them every payroll. And you would never- and I do that manual process because it’s on my job description. That is something I wouldn’t have done at Kraft or Abbott. And wouldn’t have had to do. But also, you have to meet the organization where it’s at and you have to do what needs to get done to generate the outcome you want.
Yeah, a hundred percent. And you get to see both what tactical is going into it, but also help create the strategy. We always say with our recruiting for companies like that, like no task is too small, no task is too big. Like you have to just be ready to take it all. And even Hirewell size, we’re kind of in the same boat here.
So Bill and I can definitely relate. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So you talked a little bit earlier just about your master’s, which congratulations on that. That’s such a great accomplishment. Having your master’s in leadership and organizational change from Northwestern. For some of the other HR professionals listening to this podcast, do you think having a master’s is needed to be successful in your job and has your outlook on companies changed since you’ve gone through that Northwestern program?
Yeah. I do not think you need a master’s degree to be successful as an HR leader. I think it depends on your aspirations and the time to those aspirations. I do think that having a master’s degree accelerates your perspective and your network and your career path. So if that’s something that folks are interested in doing faster, I do think that it accelerates it.
So I had attended the University of Michigan as an undergrad, and I wanted to go to graduate school, but really waffled on an MBA because I felt redundant. I was in the Ross School at Michigan. And when I discovered Northwestern’s MSLOC program, Learning and Organizational Change, I was hopeful that it would help me understand better the theoretical and psychological underpinnings of learning and change in organizations.
And I think it did, right? I learned about mental models and schemas and organizational citizenship behaviors. What! Things that us OD folks and IO psych folks just geek out on and no one else understands. But it was a really good foundation to being able to translate some of the interventions we might make in an organization.
And I took this class in grad school, and it was an elective in the political science department and the professor had us take an issue on a current policy issue in the government. And then he said, okay, now write a persuasive essay on the opposite side. It was one of the best exercises I’ve ever done because it really forced me to take the perspective and walk in the shoes of someone who thinks differently.
And that’s been enormously beneficial as I navigate my career. Absolutely. Yeah. Kind of just shift gears, but also just talking about employees voices and things like that.
We’ve seen a big, you know, push for work from home, hybrid schedules. There’s the divide of what the company wants versus what the employee wants. And in recent news, the Philadelphia mayor actually just ordered their city workers to go back five days a week. So we’d love to just hear your thoughts on that remote, hybrid, five days in the office and being in HR.
How do you keep teams motivated in a remote or a more hybrid setting? When I form opinions, I try to gather as much research or data as possible. And there’s two sources right now that I think are really compelling. There’s a 2022 Harvard study called this hybrid work, the best of both worlds.
It was a field experiment and then the global survey of working arrangements. And we’re learning a lot, right, from these these surveys. So we’re learning that like average day is desired in office seem to vary by culture in the United States. The desire is about three days or less. The most common office days in America are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The earlier you are in your career, the more you should be in the office.
For performance, two days in the office seems best. And then it just varies by job function. It varies on the tasks and the job you need to be doing. So if you’re in food service or cleaning or office management, you should be in the office. If you’re a professional, you might be able to do hybrid.
If you’re an IT or payroll person, being fully remote might make sense. And so I think there’s so much data to consider. And I don’t think we have it perfect at Broadstreet but what we’ve done is we aim for some in person time with flexibility. So our Chicago based staff, which is about 2/3rds of our employees, come into the office about once a week and we track that.
And they come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday to increase the density. So we take Friday off the table. And then all of our employees come in 3 times a year. We’re on a trimester performance management basis. And they come in 3 times a year for 2 days and we spend time in meetings, in organizational conversations and strategy conversations, and then evening activities where we get a chance to connect on a more social basis.
And so those have been really great and helping people bridge the gap of that remote workforce. And then we also have a weekly Monday staff meeting and that staff meeting is 45 minutes. Everybody hops on and it’s either updates from our CEO or our leadership team and or information about our strategy, information about our financial performance- something that’s cool that’s happening in a business or
something we’ve won and or we do value shout outs. So we’ll have like today’s a value shout out day. Who do you want to recognize for this value or that value? Somebody who’s done something great that we don’t have visibility to. We also do trivia contests. Our population loves those. They like trivia, that’s for sure.
COVID is obviously one which we’re referencing in the work from home piece, but you’ve been obviously leading HR for over 20 years. And a lot’s obviously changed from a current event standpoint to how people approach HR.
How have you seen the HR change during those, you know, during your tenure leading HR? In some ways a lot. In some ways, not so much. Right. I think the biggest changes have been technology, certainly. So automating HR processes, increasingly using our HRIS for employee self service or manager self service and I anticipate we’ll see more of that as AI
applications come more to the fore. Data. I think the business has required it of us. And we have now the tools as we’re gathering information with technology to be able to synthesize and present that information in a much shorter time frame. So data has become a driver of how we think about and gather insights.
The employee experience has become center to the work that we do. I think we’ve learned a lot about mental health and we value psychological safety in the workplace and we’re providing more resources and ways to take that into consideration and the ways that we work. And then, of course, diversity inclusion, as we become more aware of having diverse perspectives, drive innovation and that having an inclusive workforce helps increase the odds that those diverse perspectives are shared.
We’ve doubled down in HR on making sure that we’re creating inclusive places, and that we’re recruiting for diverse perspectives in our candidates. Great. Well, and also through your tenure, you’ve led HR during many presidential election years, which we are currently in. During an election year,
has that affected your job in HR and the employees that you support, given that it’s somewhat of a divisive topic? Yes. I can’t believe it’s been, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. But I have a great story about the 2000 election. So in 2000, Al Gore and George Bush were running for president, and I was at Chicago Booth.
And I will not say who I was rooting for, but the dean and I were rooting for one candidate, and my boss and my colleague were rooting for another candidate. And we would spend time having lunch conversations about policy and why one person was better than the other.
At one point, it was so fun, the dean came in and said I got some campaign signs let’s plaster them all over your office. We did! We plastered them all over and of course, our loving colleagues defaced them the next day as a treat. And then somebody won, you know. George Bush won and the winning team got to take the other team out for lunch.
And we had a lot of fun with it. And at the end of the day, we were Americans. And maybe that was a unique situation, but that’s what I remember from 20 years ago. It is different today. It is. And I think it’s because of good things and bad things. On the good side, I think we’re more cognizant of the need for inclusion and how people think and how these things play out in the workplace and making sure that there’s psychological safety in the workplace.
And on the not so good side, politics have become really tribal and emotional. And in the age of social media, they’re ubiquitous. You’ve got news as entertainment and people able to give their opinion. So that begets a different role for HR in organizations. So just yesterday I received, I guess, informational email about all the things you should be thinking about from an HR person’s standpoint.
And it was things like “Guidelines for handling workplace tension. Sample crisis management communications. Emergency and disaster resources in case of civil unrest. Talking politics at work.” So we have more of a hand in thinking through, and setting expectations about how we talk about these things or if we talk about them, depending on the culture.
And that really has changed over the last 20 years. For sure. I love that you shared that story though from 2000. That’s great to hear. Take you back to the good, the good old days. That was the recount election, right? I feel like ancient, you know? That was the recount election, right? It was the recount election.
Yeah. Yeah, it was the recount election. How can you forget? Well, switching gears a little away from politics, moving towards talent acquisition and recruiting. I don’t know if you saw this, but Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, recently came out talking about how rethinking hiring and he’s been outspoken and about persistence and weaknesses. And in the school to work transition,
he talked a little bit about expanding recruiting and talent pools and opening up opportunities to people without college degrees, and formerly incarcerated individuals as well. What is your opinion on his feelings regarding recruitment? And what is your general philosophy on acquiring top talent in the workforce?
So I got to meet Jamie Dimon when I was at Booth and there was a book written by him, by this guy Rakesh Khurana, it’s called Searching for a Corporate Savior, and it purports the secretive nature of selecting a CEO and the charisma versus experience divide that many people have. And I got to meet him when he came to Booth. And I took him the book
and I said, what do you think about this? And he’s like, let me sign that sucker. And he said something like, “Stop searching. There aren’t any saviors” right? But he’s become so, such an interesting figure because his advice is really practical. And I agree with a lot of what he says here. I don’t think of him as a savior, but I do admire him.
And I think, gosh, there are persistent weaknesses in the school to work transition. Only about 30 percent of Americans go to college. And just because you went to an Ivy league school doesn’t make you a great worker. There are a lot of jobs that don’t need degrees. Jobs and call centers and cyber and data and program and financial management.
I’m sure we’ll see more with the rise of AI. And he talks about the formerly incarcerated. He doesn’t talk about the hardened or lifelong criminals. He’s talking about people with misdemeanors who made mistakes who are trying to get their lives back on track, right. And I think the most useful construct here might be how the military divides their tracks, right?
I think a lot of this is about career pathing, identifying the job tasks that need to be done, and then matching the skills to those job tasks and figuring out whether or not you really need a degree to do that. And so I think about the military. They have an officer track. They send people to college and those officers go to college and they are in leadership roles because they are taught the skills needed for leadership.
But then they also have enlisted personnel and there are career tracks there too. And those people may not go to college. They may learn while they’re doing and they may rise through the ranks of the enlisted personnel. And the split there is about 20 percent officers, 80 percent enlisted. And I think that’s a useful construct for us in HR and organizations because there are so many jobs that don’t require a college degree.
So true. I’ve always said in many ways, I think that you know, and I think I’ve voiced this to you before, but I think there needs to be even in high school. Honestly, like you mentioned career pathing- I think there should be some classes and not only high school, or I mean, I think even potentially earlier on middle school to give people an idea of what careers are actually out there.
And what do you do in those jobs? Because most people I think, say, right? Like I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know I was going to do right out of school. Most people don’t, you know. And I think we’re not in the minority in that sense, but if you have an idea of what actually other jobs are out there, it’s going to provide you a little bit of a better understanding of what do you want to major in?
Or what do you want to- what classes do you want to take in high school? Right? I mean, it gives you a much better perspective. So many people look at maybe what their parents do or their friends or their friends’ parents and whatnot. And you don’t really get a good sense of maybe you don’t want to do any of that, right?
Maybe that’s not really what you’re going to be good at. And people say that the first job out of school isn’t really that important. I think it is, and it isn’t. But if you realize that it’s not a great job for you, and it’s 6 years from that point, you’re a bit pigeonholed unless you’re willing and able to make a financial step back in your career to make the transition to something you love and really want to do.
Right? Which a lot of people will be brave enough to do that. But, you know, if you have a family and things like that, you might not have the privilege to do that. And you might be actually stuck in that job. So if you had classes earlier on to where you provided, I think more career mapping in the education system,
I think more people know what they want to do once they graduate from high school or college. That and just experiences, right? I have a friend who has a sophomore in high school, and he took a home ec kind of class that we would have called home ec way back in the 80s.
They built a shed, and this kid did it for two semesters, and he loved the work, and he thought it was awesome, and he’s probably going to go to college, but he’s like, this, I loved. That was really fun, building something with my hands. So experiences and internships and apprenticeships, and I think all of this comes down to what you said.
It is the development interventions are going to make a huge difference. What are we teaching in high school? What are the pathways? How do we get people exposure to many different things? And then how do we make sure we’re valuing all of those things in our society, in our culture?
Yes, we need all of those skill sets. We need all of those workers and paths for people to grow, whatever they do. We do. You know, for sure. Yep. So Tonya, I want to talk to you a little bit to kind of tie it into what we do. When you’re looking to hire, and specifically we’re going to talk about an executive leader, whether it’s confidential or not for your company, and you determined you do need an outside recruiter.
What are the main characteristics that you look to determine for your partner, just how to find the best firm to partner with? As I remind our hiring managers all the time, recruiting is an art, not a science. And so I look for people who have a proven track record of asking really good questions and making really good judgments about what they’re seeing in front of them from candidates and synthesizing their thoughts in a way that can tell me who this person is and what their judgment is.
I tend to shy away from really analytical approaches, where we’re doing a lot of assessment. I think that is a, it’s warranted in some cases. But it’s an attempt to take all of the art out of the approach. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It is hopeful, but it doesn’t take all of the guesswork out of it.
And so I’m looking for people who have spent a lot of time interviewing, who understand people, who have been running businesses and understand what it takes to lead in a business, and what a good leader looks like. And that’s at the top of my list. Absolutely. I love that, recruiting’s an art, not a science.
I might steal that from you. Please do.
Why didn’t this candidate work out? Well, we missed that interview process. There’s a lot of moving parts and factors, so. Yeah. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many people you have them meet with. There are people who are really good at sailing through those processes, and so sometimes we just even in the best days, we don’t catch something that might be a derail or for somebody in an organization. But it’s always about developing a right recruiting process and screening process as well to where you’re not getting rid of the great candidates, but also still providing enough steps to obviously screen them enough for what a particular company or client is looking for.
Right? Which is always something you have to tweak and change, depending on the job, the role, and the company itself. Right. Because you don’t want to waste. I mean, that’s why a lot of places hire us, right? To save them time and have them not look at as many people, as we’re looking at, of course. Because that’s just,
that’s why we’re paid, of course. And that’s a great point, Bill. I always talk about the vendor partners in HR being an extension of the HR team. And that is also something I look for is somebody who can be my champion and my voice in a process when I can’t be present. And so that kind of synergy between
the organization that you’re working with, the cultures, the ways of thinking, are really important when you’re looking for an executive search firm. Absolutely. Well now, we’d like to wrap up with our unfiltered HR question segment, which is where we like to ask our guests a little less formal and more uncomfortable questions.
But back in 2012, you and I worked together Tonya, when you were a candidate interviewing for, I believe it was an HR director job, when we were representing a fortune 500 client. I believe you ended up getting an offer, which is right around the first few, I don’t know, first few years I think when I was in HR search. But you ended up getting an offer, which you eventually declined.
We don’t need to get into the exact details of the company or the offer, et cetera. But do you ever regret declining that offer and what was your impression working with Hirewell? Oh, the hot seat. It’s true. I met you in 2012, Bill. And I was expecting my last child, who is now almost 12, Charlie. And Kraft was going through a divestiture of its North American business, and I had only been at Kraft a couple of years.
There were a lot of long tenured folks and I was really turned off by that sort of infighting and the, like, I’m taking this talent with me and we’re better because we’re going to this company. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what is happening? So when you came calling and knocking on my email, I was really intrigued.
And the more I learned about the company that you presented, the more I met with the folks there, the more excited I was. And they were willing to honor my maternity leave. What? So it was a really cool opportunity. At the last minute, as you and I were signing the dotted line, a leader that was going to the Kraft foods, North America, who I really admired and liked, came and said, “Hey, we’re going to turn this place in its head.
We’re going to build this awesome culture. And I want you to be part of this four person team who’s going to do it. We’re going to reset the values. We’re going to reset the culture. You’re going to build a corporate university.” And I was like, how do I pass that up? So it really was on a left field.
And while I would love to say that I regret it because I have a really good relationship with you, Bill. And I didn’t want to say no to you. I don’t regret it in the longterm. That opportunity at Kraft in those three years was an extraordinary learning experience with great people.
I remember sitting around with our, the leader of that group at the time. And he said, he looked at the three of us and said, “I feel like we’re living the good old days.” And he couldn’t have been more right. It’s one of the most special times I’ve had in my career and I was really grateful that I stayed.
Yeah, I still remember that call like it was yesterday, honestly. But, you know, as I always tell most of the candidates we work with, you got to make the right decision for you, you know. I say you always got to have all the right facts and you’re going to have to live the decision.
I’m not sitting there day in and day out with you at Kraft Heinz or the other organization, right? It doesn’t really impact our lives much. It will really impact yours. But we’ve had a lot of those conversations with candidates over the years. I’ve never been a believer of putting a square peg in a round hole and pushing somebody into a job.
They got to make the decision that they do feel is the best fit for them. I mean, some have regrets. Some may not. But certainly I don’t hold any grudges or hard feelings towards that. So, even though it was disappointing, as I was just kind of starting off in the HR recruiting- I remember your face. I didn’t even know how to react,
honestly. I was like, oh my god! I think I would handle it a lot different probably now than I would have probably then. Way less deer in the headlights look, you know. The best part is though, 12 years later, you still have a great relationship.
You two are still in touch and this conversation is happening. So I’d also think it just shows the relationship piece of it. Might not take our job, but we are still here. Sure. For sure. And I have so much respect for the work that Hirewell does and the best practices you bring to HR leaders and the constant, yeah, just cheering us all on as we go about our day to day.
So, yeah. Well you make it easy, especially working with folks like you. So we really appreciate you making time to join our podcast, but that is all we have time for today. So thanks for everyone for tuning into this week’s episode! Today we met with Tonya Wallach and discussed her career, thoughts on HR and the talent market, how political and work from home events affect her role in HR,
and if getting your master’s degree is worth the time and money. We will be back again next month with a new special guest. And quick reminder for how you can support our Beyond the Offer podcast, you can find us and all of our content on the Hirewell social media platform, which you can find through hirewell.com. Take care everyone. And thanks for tuning in!
