“Leadership is so much more than just being able to hit numbers.” – Paul Southgate, Head of People and Performance at MyBudget, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.

As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.

This week, we had a great conversation with Paul Southgate at MyBudget, who began his HR career in Recruitment before transitioning to a number of HR Leadership roles including positions as Senior Consultant at Connect2Staff and Leader of the Fintech Division at Expand Executive Search.

In September 2017, Paul joined the team at MyBudget as People and Culture Leader, ascending the ranks within the company to assume his current role in December 2019.

Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?

In my twenties, I was intent on seeing the world, so I wasn’t worried about sticking to one career, but by the end of them, I realised I needed a stable career and some experience, sought it, and got offered a role in Recruitment. I enjoyed the opportunity to use my people skills in a generalist role, and I quickly found I was able to build strong networks with clients as well as really getting to know candidates and what they wanted to achieve in their own careers in order to find them the right job.

My role with Connect2Staff gave me great knowledge around Recruitment in general, but my Recruitment career really took off when I joined Expand. I focused on the Payments sector initially, but I quickly found that it was part of a bigger picture, which was the Fintech industry. There were some big organisations within Payments that I built good relationships with, but ultimately I didn’t feel that was the direction the exciting part of financial services was heading in. Instead, I was excited by Fintech and the emerging technology being created by start-ups around that. 

At that point in time, now-major Fintech companies had teams of 20-30 people and highly contactable CEOs, and I found that when I got out there and started networking, I was managing to get face time with the CEOs themselves. I was on a really steep learning curve in terms of my knowledge then, but I found that if you got in front of people and showed genuine interest, then told them who you were, what you were doing, and what you’d done previously, you could break into an emerging industry. 

I managed to build some really good relationships, and I found that the stronger they were, the more trust clients were putting in me to find their big hires. Because of that, I was able to hire for senior management and C-Level roles, which built up my reputation as well as allowing me to continue to build my network and work with more and more exciting clients. Thanks to that network, I became a thought leader in the Fintech recruiting industry—someone that people could engage with and ask to be an introducer as much as find hires. I got to that place within a year, so it was very fast-tracked, but fantastic.

After three years, I decided that I was interested in looking at a career that wasn’t exclusively Recruitment. I realised that even at the highest level, once you make a hire, your contact with the candidate and ability to follow their career is limited. I wanted to be able to find the right person, get them in the right role, and then nurture them to ensure they’re successful in the long-term. I wanted to have an influence on the company culture, see product development and other hands-on aspects, and have day-to-day  contact with those on the ‘front lines’ of the company as they built and delivered the technology.

Around this time, I attended Money20/20 in Copenhagen—the biggest Fintech conference in the world—for business development and to meet clients. I met the Founder/CEO of MyBudget whilst I was there, and started working with the business as my client initially, but once we’d built up a relationship, Tammy offered me the position of People and Culture Leader. The current HR Manager was scheduled to leave two months after I joined, so I used those two months to really get an insight into what she’d done in terms of workforce training and Learning and Development. 

Since then, I’ve built out the People and Culture team, and overhauled our recruitment strategy in terms of introducing behavioural assessments, topgrading documents, and a range of interview techniques. As a result, we are currently experiencing the lowest churn rate of the company’s 20-year history.

Alongside that, we have also launched a mentoring programme and a leadership development programme in the last 12 months to nurture our emerging talent. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is promoting overachieving members of staff to leadership positions without also equipping them with the correct experience, toolkit, or understanding of what’s required of them, and we were keen to overcome that.

I’m still on a learning curve. Leadership is so much more than just being able to hit numbers, and creating a leadership development programme has contributed to my development as a leader as well as that of those in the programme itself. I constantly get good feedback about it—all our executives have signed up to mentor people, and regularly put clear plans in place to help their mentees achieve their goals. Our mentoring programme is open to any employee—from those working in Client Experience to mid-level management—and we’ve seen some great results.

Seeing people benefit from Learning and Development and having their careers advanced and nurtured by the way our People and Performance team operates is exactly why I left Recruitment. I joined MyBudget to have an impact, do really positive things for people in the workplace, and see them grow. That’s what I love

Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?

The biggest challenge or project we have faced this year is the fast moving changes that have taken place due to COVID. MyBudget up until March 2020 was almost exclusively an office based operation and within a month we had to quickly move to set up our entire workforce to be remote and able to complete their daily responsibilities whilst ensuring our systems remained secure and stable. This project was all consuming and required long days for several weeks but I’m happy to say we successfully delivered.

Our Founder/CEO is a huge advocate for diversity at a time when the tech industry is still quite male-dominated—although that is changing—so that’s a key theme for us. We have searched globally in all the roles we offer to achieve that diversity, which has presented challenges in and of itself, but we’ve been able to achieve a 55% female workforce in our tech team when those rates in the rest of the sector are around 15-20%. We also run a Women in Tech event, where we gather keynote speakers who head up organisations or are involved in exciting product innovations from all over Australia.

What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?

I would recommend joining CIPD and taking a qualification, because on-the-job experience is fantastic, but the qualifications will just give you that solid foundation for you to make decisions from.

The key thing in HR for me is ensuring that you have great ethics, morals, and you place the company values at the centre of everything you do whilst also managing to stay commercially-focused. That can sometimes be the challenging part, as you’ve got to be the middle ground for both the company and for the employees and ensure outcomes are best for both. It takes a level-headed approach; sometimes you have to take the emotion out of a decision whereas sometimes it has to be emotionally-driven, but it’s about finding that balance whilst also having the qualification to back up what you feel is essential.

My biggest personal challenge when transitioning from Recruitment to HR was gaining knowledge of employment law and understanding how processes such as redundancies, exits, and placing people on performance management plans need to be managed and executed at the right point. A good blend of experience and your CIPD qualification will enable you to do that.

It’s really important to keep abreast of everything that’s happening in HR. Cultures and expectations are always changing, and you need to be responding to that, especially if you’re looking to attract talent in a competitive sector like technology. Benefits and what you can offer to your employees are as important as salary.

Paul has been working as Head of People and Performance since December 2019, and provides executive leadership of the People and Culture, Quality Assurance, Client Resolutions, Risk and Legal, and Training functions within MyBudget.

If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.