“Your day to day work should only be a percentage of what you do. Spend the rest of your time on projects, building your brand and making an impact in priority areas.” – Rebecca Oldham, Director of Talent Acquisition at Mastercard, 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 Rebecca Oldham, who began her HR career as a Resourcer at recruitment agency Meet, before being promoted to Consultant. After a year, Rebecca joined Amazon as a Recruitment Coordinator, a role she held for one year before transitioning to Campaign Recruitment Specialist.
In 2016, Rebecca left Amazon to join Adidas’ Talent Acquisition team as a Recruiter based in Germany and was promoted to Senior Recruiter one year later. In 2018, she joined Mastercard in the role of Manager, Talent Acquisition which she held until January 2022 when she was promoted to Director, Talent Acquisition.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I studied English and Sports Science at Loughborough and chose that degree with the idea of a career in sports journalism. I really enjoyed the people focused work, communications and business aspects and when I graduated I thought sales would be a good fit. In 2013, I joined Meet as a Resourcer in Pharmaceutical, Marketing and Sales. When I joined it was a tiny company with only 15 of us in the office. I quickly realised I was far more interested in the hands-on recruitment and process side, rather than business development and decided I would be a better fit for an in-house recruitment position.
At the time, moving to an in-house role seemed like a tricky path to tread and a big decision to make. A six month FTC role was available at Amazon and I decided to go for it – I was young enough to take the risk and see where it took me.
All the way through my university studies, I was also an international athlete playing softball for Great Britain. Juggling studies, sport and a part time job taught me to become a master of discipline. During the day I had to find the most efficient way to do things and I learnt to keep my head down and focus on the task at hand.
Those skills helped me in Amazon’s fast paced environment and they still help me on a daily basis now. In my first year Amazon moved from Slough to London and the business grew by 200%. It was a huge transition and I got an excellent grounding. Despite the business growth, the recruitment team’s numbers stayed flat for a very long time so I was doing a lot of day to day logistics but I was also lucky to be involved in graduate recruitment and ad hoc projects that weren’t necessarily recruitment but were very important for HR functions, such as invoice payments and reviewing the PSL.
After a year I transitioned from sourcing to a newly created role of campaign recruitment specialist. Amazon was growing at a crazy rate and I was responsible for outreach events, candidate screening, candidate experience and a staggering number of assessment centres every week.
Had I not received a message from my future boss at Adidas I probably would have stayed at Amazon. It was very innovative within their recruitment team, they took a lot of risks and it was so fast paced that you could get ten years of experience in two years, but given I’m so into sports Adidas was a dream company.
I base my career moves on my managers, I look into their background and it’s important to me that I have someone I can learn from. Michael, my boss at Adidas, had that background and I’m glad I took the risk of going to Germany. Working at Adidas was probably the making of my recruitment career. The team was international, there were 72 nationalities on campus and there was much more weight on internal recruitment. I was focused on a growth area for the business called Concept to Consumer that covered everything from merchandising to retail store builds. I got involved in projects and was promoted quickly to a senior recruiter role for all of the global brands for football, outdoor and heartbeat sports, which I’m very passionate about.
I’ve always put my hands up for a lot of things, particularly ones that others might find a little bit boring and I became heavily involved in process improvement, and knowledgeable about labour laws and immigration. I spent 40% of my time becoming a subject matter expert for others in the team on those topics.
As a recruiter you can become indispensable to the business, HR and total rewards if you understand a bit more about what they do and can preempt issues with potential offers, or know what candidates can be hired in particular locations. Your knowledge makes you a qualified partner to those parts of HR, which in turn makes your relationships stronger.
While at Adidas I was always asking, what’s going to make the biggest impact on my team, and how can I drive solutions to bring improvements for all of us? That’s a theme throughout my career, I have a passion for governance and process improvement and when I joined Mastercard I was able to continue with this.
In July 2018 I set up the Mastercard data and services recruitment team, they’d never had one before, previously it was split across numerous recruiters. Starting the team meant I was able to put structures in place and as there was limited awareness about Mastercard’s consulting business in the market a lot of the work was direct search.
My team now does roughly 250 hires per year and we focus on 20 countries. Over the last three years my manager has been supportive in building up a team for me so I can start my management career and I’ve become involved in projects with a wider, global perspective. I’m seeing a lot of opportunity where I am now, and there’s still so much we can do to develop and change.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
One challenge I’m facing at the moment is the shortage of talent acquisition (TA) talent on the market. I’m recruiting heavily in several countries for my own team and I’ve been surprised to find less talent than I expected. I mean that in terms of quantity, but also quality and professionalism. I’ve seen less people take the route into a recruitment coordinator or in-house role, as I did, and more people staying with agencies.
It’s been a challenging time for the industry in terms of recruiting TA talent and I don’t know whether that’s because of the perception of TA as separate from generalist HR. I’d love to see how that evolves over the next few years because I think TA has a wonderful career path, in the right environment there’s so many opportunities and I’ll be interested to see whether it moves up towards a generalist HR path in future.
The market is crazy at the moment in terms of job searching in general. My team is having to be more creative and do more direct search than ever before. At the moment there is a huge talent shortage but of course the growth plans of the business don’t stop. We need to get creative both about how we view talent – by being flexible and looking at longer term development for candidates rather than someone that can hit the ground running – and also about how we develop junior talent. I expect graduate programmes to become increasingly important, so the next step is looking at how we retain those people, who are our future talent pool.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Educate yourself on relevant functions and be inquisitive, it will make you a much better partner to HR and the business. The most brilliant TA specialists that I’ve worked with have done similar things to me, in the sense that they’ve basically become subject matter experts in a particular area, not just the day to day recruiting side, but they’ve become a go-to person within a function.
In TA we get involved in everything and you need to know so much. Arm yourself with knowledge and curiosity and understand the tools that you use every day. Being a subject matter expert, even in simple things like the technology you work with, will mean a, you’re more efficient, b, you become an integral part of the team and organisation and c, you can come up with solutions and processes to make things better.
Talent acquisition is not just about filling roles. It’s about how you run the entire process from initial contact to onboarding in the best possible and most efficient way that your candidates and business are super happy with. Your day to day work should only be a percentage of what you do. Spend the rest of your time on projects, building your brand and making an impact in priority areas.
Rebecca has over seven years experience in recruitment and talent acquisition. She has been working at Mastercard since 2018 and became a Director, Talent Acquisition in January 2022.