“Wherever you might be in your career, continuing to improve your skills is key. Budgeting, process improvement, and analysis are always very useful skills to have.” – Yinka Opaneye, Group HR Director at GameAnalytics, 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 Yinka Opaneye at GameAnalytics, who began his career as an HR Administrator at Mattel Inc. before moving to the Jubilee Hall Trust to work as an administrator and subsequently an HR Manager with responsibilities towards employee surveys, training & development, and payment & reward structures. In 2011, Yinka took on a role as Team Leader for HR Shared Services at Transport for London, later working as Recruitment Lead with legal, compliance, and immigration responsibilities at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
Remaining in the public health sector, Yinka joined the team at Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust as Head of Employee Relations with a number of associated training and compliance responsibilities in 2013. In 2015, he moved on to act as Global HR & Payroll Manager at Lamex Foods Europe, with responsibilities towards employee relations, recruitment, and learning and development. Alongside this, Yinka took on a role as Chief HR Officer at OKA-HR Limited, which he carried into 2018 as he became HR Director at GameAnalytics. Yinka ascended within GameAnalytics to assume his current directorial responsibilities in January 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
My first entrance into HR came while studying my degree in Managerial and Administrative Studies. I saw there was a role available in China working with Mattel. They are a well-respected brand, and China is an exciting, very dynamic market I wanted to be a part of. That was a brilliant experience.
After I finished my degree, I went on to work at Jubilee Hall. I first joined the team there in an administrative position, but after about six months, the Finance and HR Manager told me she was stepping back from her duties and she felt I’d be a good fit to take on the HR role, which I did. Jubilee Hall was a really great company to work for with a wealth of new and interesting opportunities to develop my HR career. I got to make a lot of mistakes and get outside my comfort zone, and everyone was very accepting of that and willing to support me.
After four fantastic years there, I decided I wanted to work in a more specialist area in a much larger organisation to see how things were done from an ideal standpoint in terms of policies and practices having a lot of input from charities, specialized groups, and employment representatives. I was able to find that in the public sector, so I moved to Transport for London. That environment really encouraged internal movement, and there was the opportunity to move across and diagonally as well as up, which I really enjoyed. I don’t think people recognise how many roles exist within that organisation, but perhaps that’s because there’s so much internal recruitment that a lot of them aren’t advertised. Once you’re in, it’s a great place to stay because of the benefits and general atmosphere. It’s fantastic.
Staying in the public sector, I then moved to the NHS to work at Guy’s and Barnet Enfield and Haringey, where I got to specialise in Recruitment and Employee Relations respectively, and both organisations were great for the sheer volume of work I was doing and how consistent it was. I recruited nurses and consultants, and it was fascinating to see the different approaches you have to take to attract people to different roles—it gave me a huge insight into the importance of tailoring your message. The experience I got in the NHS really deepened my HR knowledge, and I’d say that Recruitment and Employee Relations are my areas of expertise because of it.
From there, I moved to Lamex Foods, where I got my first taste of having an international remit in offices worldwide. Developing HR plans that would encompass everybody and be globally compliant was a big challenge, especially as I was expected to renegotiate everybody’s contracts within my first couple of weeks there. It was a lot to do alone, but it was a great role to be thrown in at the deep end doing.
During my time at Lamex, I also set up OKA-HR, because I decided I wanted to continue to work in the private sector, and I was beginning to become more and more interested in technology start-ups, especially within fintech. It was a way to offer companies in the sector freelance HR consultancy to help them set up their initial HR functions as they scaled up.
I moved to GameAnalytics in 2018, and the set up here is very diverse, with a wide range of opportunities. Although I’m contracted with GameAnalytics, I’m involved with the HR of several companies within the Mobvista group, and each one has a slightly different culture and requires slightly different HR strategic plans. Many of them are at different stages when it comes to the sophistication of the HR processes, so the work is very wide-ranging with lots of different challenges. Some are incredibly new to HR—as GameAnalytics was when I started—while others only need light input from me.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I think we’re seeing HR in the workplace becoming more diverse. Minority groups are becoming more visible, and that’s diversifying our workforces for the better. We’re having more representation of groups like the trans community, more generations, and more atypical workers like the digital workforce. It’s more international, more globalised, and we need to create systems that can deal with that but also have inbuilt flexibility and inclusivity. A lot of technologies are being built by one particular group at the exclusion of others, and that’s a big issue. HR needs to be careful not to fall into that trap.
I personally believe that we are entering another stage of the evolution of people management; People Operations. Change within HR has always been led by the leading industry at the time, which for us is technology. If you look at leading technology companies like Google, they don’t talk about HR anymore, they talk about People Operations. Many tech start-ups also now split the HR function into two; HR—which covers the administrative and legal aspects—and Talent, although I don’t think that’s yet permeated through to HR professionals as a body.
Another aspect of People Operations I think is becoming more prevalent in HR is the focus on evidence-based decision making and data and being more data-driven, and you can see that in the number of tech start-ups supporting HR systems. We’ve really started to see how collecting and analysing data can help us to better structure our systems, and that’s a really key theme for me. AI might get a lot of attention these days, but I think big data is what will enable us to better ourselves, overcome our biases, and be more inclusive more effectively, and we still have a long way to go. I see AI being great for administrative tasks and handling basic queries around policy, but HR can never be fully automated.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
For someone looking to start off their HR career, I’d recommend looking at professional volunteering to gain that initial HR experience. Organisations are desperate for man hours, and it can be a great way to gain and use skills. Reach Volunteering is a fantastic service to connect you with opportunities to do that, but you can even contact charities or social enterprise groups directly. Volunteering will only take a few hours of your time, and it’s well worth it. I would also advise working with start-ups, as when they start to expand, they tend to promote those who have previously worked in administrative roles into early HR roles. If that’s not possible, even something like recruitment consultancy may help you to break into an HR career.
For those looking to advance their existing HR careers, I would say that sharing ideas is vital. Attend webinars and events, listen to podcasts, and join LinkedIn groups to consume as much as you can, but also create, whether that’s setting up blogs, writing articles, or just networking with others. Networking and interacting with people is a really useful way to develop and hone your HR skills as you are progressing, and allows you to try out new things.
If you’re looking to ascend to director level, you really need to focus on being business and commercially savvy. Don’t just present your case from an HR perspective; think of the impact HR might have on the profitability of the business—through things like having a more cohesive culture and streamlining processes—and demonstrate your value there. As you move up, make an effort to be more open to negotiation. There will come a point where you can’t stick so rigidly to policies and procedures if you want to get things done, and you need to find the best way to balance fairness, equality, and achieving good results with existing policy, provided you’re still fulfilling your legal obligations.
Wherever you might be in your career, continuing to improve your skills is key. Budgeting, process improvement, and analysis are always very useful skills to have.
Yinka has been working as Group HR Director at GameAnalytics since January 2019, and provides HR support and oversight across the full suite for GameAnalytics and a number of organisations owned by GameAnalytics’ parent company, Mobvista.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.