Verisk is a global data analytics company that helps businesses understand and manage risk. Now they’re tasked with completely rethinking how to build a talent pipeline in an industry where the skills didn't exist five years ago.
In this episode of Talent All Stars, Verisk's CHRO Sunita Holzer breaks down how the company built a data science recruiting engine from scratch during the pandemic, why they hire for "ecosystem thinking" over technical skills alone, and what it really means to operate in a culture where just doing your job isn't enough.
You'll hear how Verisk measures talent success (conversion rates, retention, internal mobility), why they need employees who think about geopolitics and insurance trends as much as their day-to-day tasks, and the company's approach to developing people who can handle a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Connect with Sunita: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunitaholzer/
Explore careers at Verisk: https://www.verisk.com/
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[00:00:00] Sunita Holzer: Our values are caring, learning, and results simple. It's not a 20 page document with a bunch of action steps to it. It's three basic things that everyone can understand.
So what does it really take for your business to attract world class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All Stars.
We shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. Today's talent, Allstar is Sunita Holzer, CHRO at Verisk, a global data analytics and technology company that helps businesses understand and manage risk.
This is actually sunita's fourth CHRO role across industries like real estate, IT and insurance.
So she brings a wealth of experience to this conversation. We'll dive into how she coaches direct reports, how Verisk built a pipeline of data science talent, and how they document company culture and then measure it. Consistently. So let's bring her in. Sunita, welcome to Talent All Stars.
[00:01:12] Sunita Holzer: Thank you for having me, Dave.
[00:01:15] Dave Travers: Very excited to have you and you have so much interesting background and experience. And before we get to Verisk in, in all the interesting world of data today, I wanna first go back. When HR started to feel like it might not just be your current job, it might be a calling or a career or a purpose, and what was that moment or moments as you recall where it's like, I really like this, I could see this being a thing.
[00:01:30] Sunita Holzer: Yeah, so I started out as a recruiter, interestingly enough, and I always thought, okay, so you hired the talent and once they're hired, your job is done and you move on. I quickly found out that you really became the trusted advisor to the people that you hired,
And I was 24 and hiring people with much more experienced and much bigger roles.
And you know, I was thinking, wow, they're calling me after they're hired and asking me things and I didn't understand what that was. And it was humbling, really humbling that they appreciated what I knew about the company and how to navigate some of the leaders and just how to work. Respected me and those relationships lasted the whole time I was there.
So that to me was like, wow, I could really have an impact on these individuals and I can make it easier for them to work here, so this is what I wanna do.
[00:02:30] Dave Travers: Yeah. And how did it change as you then started to become a leader? So you're not the individual anymore as you rise up with a, that is making the placement and getting the singular phone call, but now you're coaching others to do that. How did that feel? How was that different?
[00:02:45] Sunita Holzer: Coaching is my favorite thing in my job. I continue to offer the support that anybody needs, and I really understand, regardless of how much experience you have, that when you're new to a company, it is a big change and it can be unwielding for some people. And the degree to which they can have people who are currently working at the company give them confidence and reassure them, makes them successful.
And so I continue to do that everywhere I can.
[00:03:00] Dave Travers: Coach me now, like everyone who's a leader. Of having somebody say, you were such a great coach to me, or You really coached me through that, and having that reputation. What's the secret? How do you become great at that
[00:03:00] Sunita Holzer: listening? You have to listen, listen. And you can't put yourself, you know, they say put yourself in the shoes of the other person.
You really can't do that. Uh, it's not really possible. So you have to listen and pick up kind of the cues, both from the body language and the words on what that individual is going through, and try to help them with that.
It's not just what they're saying, but it's what they're feeling. And those two things together give you some insight on the type of coaching you can provide.
[00:03:45] Dave Travers: How does coaching different than managing? So you obviously have a lot of management responsibilities, but you're talking about coaching in particular. Like how do I, how do I think about those two things? Distinctly?
[00:03:45] Sunita Holzer: Managing has coaching in it, but you're also very task specific. You're giving direction and telling people, this is what I need you to do by this time, and so on, and you're checking the progress of that.
Coaching is totally separate. So if you think of managing as the what, what you have to get done, coaching is the how. How you do it and in life, it's not just what you get done, it's the how and the impact that you lead behind that is so significant.
Without a good coach or a manager who takes coaching seriously, it's gonna be really hard for someone to succeed.
[00:04:30] Dave Travers: Definitely. So if, if I'm a, if I'm a rising manager and I desire to be a great coach, not, uh, and the how part of, of management, how do I get started? So I'm gonna listen really well. How do I know what the right cue is to get started and get the snowball rolling downhill a little bit.
[00:04:45] Sunita Holzer: Someone has to ask you for some help.
I mean, I don't think you just like have a conversation with somebody and then say, Hey, lemme coach you on that point. Um, they have to ask you, they have to say, Hey, help me out. You know, this just happened. I don't know what this means. And your job is kind of understand and listen to what they're saying and then offer them another point of view.
They can take that point of view or they cannot. It doesn't mean just because you have a coach or you're coaching that you're gonna change somebody.
That's not what coaching is about. It's to offer them another point of view, the biggest recognition you'll receive is when you've coached somebody and they come back and they say, thank you for doing that, because it changed everything, or to help me in this way, or something like that.
[00:05:30] Dave Travers: Yeah. It feels good to me just to hear about somebody doing that. And it wasn't even me who that, who that happened to that there's something so naturally satisfying as people, leaders to think about that. So I think the listening thing is so clear. And as you rose clearly, you listened well and coached people well, 'cause you increasingly got more and more responsibility. How did you think about that?
[00:05:45] Dave Travers: How did your job change as you went from being a leader to a leader of leaders in multiple teams and all that, and you were now not just in recruiting that you. From, but you're managing teams where you don't really know how their jobs work.
[00:06:00] Sunita Holzer: Yeah. So I went from being an individual contributor as a recruiter to managing. A group of recruiters, you know, where I knew their job and I could help them to then getting into different areas of human resources as a generalist and learning those schools. So how did those skills, so how did my job change?
Every time I took on something, I had to learn a new. Skillset within human resources, it's not the same. Recruiting is not the same as talent management. Talent management is not the same as operations and so on, and employee relations is a big piece of it. So I had to learn each time I did something and each time I'd learned something I felt like I was adding to my skills and developing my skills, which then naturally made me a candidate for the next level and the level after that.
But also it's the how along the way and the leaders that I partnered with and the value they thought I provided that helped me move along. It's not contrary to what people say.
I did not look up and say, I want that job. That is not what I did. I basically did my job and had a desire to learn. And kept moving till I learned different skills, even took lateral moves so I could learn different skills.
And then I was well positioned to get promoted.
[00:07:15] Dave Travers: Yeah. I once talked to a guy who ran not just marathons or ultra marathons, but a hundred mile races, and he's like, people always ask me what the secret is, and then he paused and I was like, okay, what's the secret?
He's like. One step at a time. I was like, that's it. That's the whole thing. Like, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so now you have risen to, to lead hr, not just at Verisk, but this is, I believe, your fourth time leading hr. So how do you think about what's different? Is leading HR the same every time or is it wildly different based on each individual company?
Or how as somebody who might aspire to that, whether it's one step at a time or looking all the way to the top of the mountain, how do you think about doing it at different companies? What's different from one to another?
[00:07:45] Sunita Holzer: Yeah, so back to what I said, the core skills are the same. You know, recruiting is recruiting.
Talent management is talent management. Employee relations is employee relations. You need to know the laws and the regulations and so on. However, every company has its own culture.
I understand It's really important you how to operate within that culture, and it's a culture that you believe and embrace 'cause that is the only way you'll succeed.
So every company I've worked with has had a different culture and it's required lots of thinking on my part to really understand how to accomplish whatever the goals are or to support the talent in that culture and the growth of that culture. All companies want the same thing. They wanna hire good people, they wanna keep good people, they wanna have high engagement.
But not all companies do it the same way.
[00:08:30] Dave Travers: Yes. And so how, though you mentioned earlier about partnering with so many other leaders as you learned and as you grew.
So if you've risen all the way through the ranks and now done this at four different places, you've partnered with a lot of people and as you're coming up for the first time.
Partnering with somebody in an area where they know a lot more than you do about something is not a natural skill and isn't always easy, how do you become a great partner where you can just have built this muscle and you can do it over and over again here?
[00:09:00] Sunita Holzer: I'd say with curiosity. You try to understand.
You ask a lot of questions and you try to understand what it is the other individual is doing and the skills they're bringing into their role.
And by asking the right questions and thinking about it, and the right questions are just your genuine interest, you develop that partnership, you have a general interest in them and you appreciate their value, then they start to have a genuine interest in you.
It's really about being curious about how they do their job. It is not a good idea to come in.
[00:09:30] Sunita Holzer: In my case, I've been a CHR four times. I got this, I did it before. Let's go. Here's the way it happened. Not a good idea.
[00:09:38] Dave Travers: Yeah. I've got my playbook. Lemme tell you. We used to
[00:09:40] Sunita Holzer: do it. Lemme that out.
[00:09:33] Dave Travers: Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:45] Sunita Holzer: Yeah. If you find yourself saying, I did that at my other company. Stop. Yes. Because nobody wants to hear that.
[00:10:00] Dave Travers: No one wants to hear that. That is such wise advice. So now you're at Verisk and you talked about curiosity, which makes sense at a data world leader in data analytics and data company. And so that people are turned on by that and interested and wanna learn more at a company like that and using curiosity as the path in where you ask questions and that being the sort of culture there.
So how do you. Like, gimme an example. If I'm a brand new leader, let's role play for a second. In some area you need to partner with. How do you get somebody going by using curiosity as your way in?
[00:10:30] Sunita Holzer: Let's say we have a leader in our claims business, right? They're looking lots of, lots of claims data. I'd be really curious like what kind of claims are these?
What, who. How much do they pay? How? How do you take that data from these multiple sources and analyze it and then come up with one way to advise your client what whatcha doing with these different data points? Where are they coming from?
So. Try to really ask the genuine questions about whatever the work is.
There's no dumb question because it's clear. I'm not head of claims. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't be expected to know.
[00:11:00] Sunita Holzer: So it's really a good idea to just take a step back and think of yourself as person off the street. What do you do? How do you do it? How does that work? One answer to one question will generate all the other questions, which will generate more questions.
Hey, that was a dumb comment. Nobody does that. People worry about that. Nobody does that.
[00:11:20] Dave Travers: So what I love about that is two things. One, it's clear just as you role model asking the questions, you're genuinely interested. You're not going through a checklist where it's like, I'm gonna ask three questions before I get to what I really wanna know.
So that's one to one.
And then two is the questions you're asking are not. HR questions, you're not driving right. Toward what HR partnership model do you, as the new head of claims, how do you want your talent strategy to evolve?
You're asking them their questions and then we'll transition to that's their safe ground as a potential partner, like I'm gonna start answering the questions where I know my own business, I know what I'm trying to figure out.
Still I know what I'm, I've already figured out.
[00:12:00] Sunita Holzer: Yeah, you lead with the business, not with your. Functional expertise.
[00:12:04] Dave Travers: Which is uncomfortable because as you point out, you, you gotta be okay with saying, I'm gonna put myself for the start of this conversation in the one down position of knowing less and going to you to learn more.
[00:12:13] Sunita Holzer: Yes, exactly.
[00:12:15] Dave Travers: Yeah. It is asign of strength, not weakness to do that, and it's amazing
[00:12:19] Sunita Holzer: and it's appreciated by the other person. Because you're taking an interest in what they value.
[00:12:30] Dave Travers: Yes, absolutely. Okay, so now you're CHRO Verisk, you have this data-driven and curiosity culture. What's the secret as somebody else who's coming in maybe to their first CHRO role?
What's the secret to thinking about, okay, what's the, what do I know from how talent works or how operations works, as you said, and how do I then marry that with the way you have at Ferris? How do I marry that with the individual company culture? What's the process for that? How do you even think about that?
[00:13:00] Sunita Holzer: So when I got here, there was a brand new CEO. Things were changing dramatically. We were going from several businesses to one business sector.
Lots and lots of change. I went on a listening tour. I went and I talked to all our employees all over the world, and I asked them why they work here, what they like, what they don't like, what they feel should change.
That then coalesced into a bunch of values, and then working with the CEO, we created the purpose, the mission, and the values of the company.
That then became the template for how we would work here. And we also created how to Work, how we Work as a document we created.
All of that sounds nice on paper, but in reality it gave us a North Star and it gave those of us who were new in the organization, including the new CEO, a way to manage and think about talent.
You can't just. Go into an organization and expect to know how to think about anything without talking to all of the people who work there.
And so this ability to create a culture based on what everybody said, let us then go back to our employees and say, you told us this, so we created this value. You told us that and we created this.
You wanted more purpose.
Here's the purpose. Here's why we're here. People need to have a North Star and they need to understand what it is the company values. Maybe it's something they don't value, maybe they opt out of that. That's okay. We did not have that experience.
People appreciated the values and the culture and you know, that's the way to think about talent.
What's meaningful to them. And that therefore having that meaning, how does that contribute to the overall value they create and therefore how the company succeeds?
[00:14:45] Dave Travers: Two things about that really resonate. One is that you started by listening rather than saying, Hey, I'm the new CHRO, you're the new CEO.
What culture are we going to impose upon this company? And really like you, it sounds like you can give multiple examples of how you did that. What's not just a talking point.
Two is you wrote it down. It's one thing to say, you know, we have a list of three bullet points, but to have a whole document with the, and a North Star, I think you called it, the North star, means now everybody in the company has a common language.
If I'm stuck in the, from the lowest person to the highest person. If I'm stuck in this elevator with somebody I know, they know this, this common North Star framework, and then we added measures to it. So we do an annual engagement survey. What are we measuring our values? Our values are caring, learning.
Simple. It's not a 20 page document with a bunch of, you know, action steps to it. It's three basic things that everyone can understand.
[00:15:45] Sunita Holzer: And then we've measured annually in our engagement survey, and we've seen since we've implemented this very clear culture. Our engagement has continued to rise in all those categories.
[00:16:00] Dave Travers: I think a lot of people have heard about engagement surveys. Many people have done them. What's the right way when utilizing a tool like that? To what extent is the results of the engagement survey something for just the executive team? To what extent is it something you publish to the whole company?
How much is it just for managers? How do you do that?
[00:16:15] Sunita Holzer: Yeah, it's for everybody. We are totally transparent about it. We share. All the details. Top line, not individual, because it's ho homogenized, so it's totally confidential, it's anonymous. We share it at the highest level in terms of key things across the organization that we're gonna do.
We share it at the business unit level. We do a spot analysis on where there's gaps. We create action steps and we hold people accountable for those action steps. And we measure year over year progress. We have a town hall, we open up with the key. Points.
And then we hold each business accountable for their actions, each function, includingHR, accountable for their actions.
Um, and then we look at year over year progress or guests.
[00:16:59] Dave Travers: Amazing.
[00:17:00] Sunita Holzer: Yeah. It's a part of the culture. People are expecting it. They know every summer there's gonna be a survey and every leader knows they're gonna be evaluated based on that survey. There's no way out. You've gotta do better.
[00:17:05] Dave Travers: Is part of the key then, leaders feeling like this isn't just some data point we're gonna look at once, but they're truly gonna be evaluated on that?
[00:17:12] Sunita Holzer: Absolutely. All of us.
[00:17:13] Dave Travers: Yeah. Amazing.
[00:17:15] Sunita Holzer: All the way up to the CEO, then we go and deliver it to the board so we're all evaluated.
[00:17:30] Dave Travers: I love it. Okay. You are at Verisk, you know, in the middle of this technology transformation because so much can be done with data that is different today than it was last year and will be different next year.
And yet, you're in the people business, you're the people person at Verisk. And so how do you manage at a rapidly evolving underlying technology? Company that is super data-driven.
And how do you then balance being the people leader and what do our people need to really drive? How, what framework should we go with the data or should we go with, you know, how somebody says the people feel about it?
How do you think about juggling those two things? Or is it even a juggle?
[00:17:57] Sunita Holzer: It's not a juggle. You have to do both.
You have to have the data, like the engagement survey data. You have to have retention data. Attraction data. You have to look at different employee populations by the country they're in. You need to benchmark satisfaction or engagement in those countries.
You bring all that data to bear. You don't just go and say, oh, okay, we need to implement this. You need to back that up just like you would with a business plan. You back it up with the data and you bring that with you.
Data, internal data, and you make your position on YX needs to change or how to solve y It's based on data.
Yeah. We're a data-driven company. You can't just go into a a meeting and say, well, I feel this way. That's not gonna work. You gotta bring your data with you. And we have a lot of it.
We have a data, we have a talent insights team that does nothing but focus on mining our data and thinking about how to correlate that data to tell a story so we can stay ahead of any particular trend.
[00:19:00] Dave Travers: So on the topic of talent. How do you think about not just recruiting the best talent that is out there and ready to go, but how do you think about then developing the talent that you already have in the building, so to speak? Give us an example. How do you think about nurturing?
[00:19:12] Sunita Holzer: Yeah. We're very intentional about this, so we hire college to do internships.
We take some of those students and we then invite them to join our data science program. We take people who aren't interns as well. We have a. Very structured 18 month data science program.
One of the only ones I think in the country we're working with our data science talent, our software engineers, our product leaders, they actually learn how to use data, analyze data, and their.
For after 18 months, they're available to then be hired by us to be data analysts, data architects, et cetera.
So that's a very unique program. We do a middle manager program. We just launched with McKinsey, an executive leadership program for the top executive executives to be in the company.
Um, so we invest a lot in learning because we believe that investment.
That we can then get the value out of it. So we do that at almost every career trajectory someone has.
[00:20:15] Dave Travers: You're so clearly such a data-driven company. So how do you, when you're starting a program like this, like the data analyst program for new grads, how do you think about measuring that and you know, proving to yourself that it's a success like you hoped it would be?
[00:20:30] Sunita Holzer: Yeah, so one is they have goals and metrics, individual goals and metrics, but the more macro is conversion. How many of these people that we hired. Actually then stayed and took a job here versus went to a competitor. And how many of those people are still with us? Three years, five years? And then what percentage of them got promoted internally?
We track all of that and we have pretty good metrics.
[00:20:45] Dave Travers: Okay. And so now as a person who started in talent and has risen to then run HR across several companies. How do you think about talent today?
Like what is the talent you need or how do you think about, as a leader, how would you advise A-A-C-H-R-O who's just taking on a new role and having to think about this, the talent that you need today to solve problems tomorrow may be different than what you have today.
Tell me about, how do you think about that?
How do you, how do you think about where do we need more of what exactly what we're doing, and where do we need to take a different approach and, and look for different types of people?
[00:21:20] Sunita Holzer: Yeah. The days of just do your job. It's not gonna work. Okay. It's not. It's, I mean, overwhelming amount of information at your fingertips.
You can't just do your job, have to do your job and be on top of all the information and all the evolving change around your job that may impact your job, both within the organization and outside the organization. So you look for people who have ecosystem thinking.
Think about all like in our. Case we service insurance companies, what's going on in insurance, not just what's going on at Verisk, what's going on in the industry globally, and how could that impact my job at Verisk?
That's one data. Point two, what's going on in the geopolitical environment that could impact us?
What's going on locally that could impact us? What's happening in terms of the overall way in which people. Buy insurance that could impact us. What was in the newspaper this morning that could all of that.
That's that ecosystem thinking. Secondarily, you talk about data like a digital mindset, a mindset that thinks about data, not has to be reminded that, oh, did you go look that up? Did you go into chat GPT and ask them? You should have done all of that and have bought that into the conversation. Here's the best practices in X or Y. So those two things are very different than let's say when I was growing up, starting out my career, you did your job, you knew what it was, and you kind of grew from it.
Now you not only have to do your job, it's kind of like the day job and then the rest of your job is to stay on top of what's happening around you.
And it is hard 'cause there's an enormous amount of information that's available and you're not gonna be able to have everything, but you need to show that you have some things that you've thought about them.
[00:23:00] Dave Travers: Yeah, I think we're comingback to curiosity like to, to be successful in a changing world where our tasks are evolving and the way we accomplish them are evolving.
You can't just do your job as you said, you know, implies like, I'm done learning now.
I'm just a mindless implementer. There's no such thing. Okay. Sunita, we always. Finish these episodes with what I call the the rapid fire section.
So I want you to imagine the scenario that you're stepping into the elevator with the CEO who says, Hey, Sunita, I was wondering, and you just have one minute or so until the elevator gets up to the executive floor.
I was thinking, you know, you came up through recruiting and you're the people leader. I spend a ton of my time interviewing. What's your best tip to become a better interviewer as an executive?
[00:23:51] Sunita Holzer: Oh, I have to go back to what I said, which is you have to listen. You have to listen, and you have to be able to probe.
It's a little bit nuanced from what I said, which is as you're listening and someone says something, you're doing it right now, Dave. You then probe in the middle of it and say, but how did this and so on? Not, not to be disrespectful or interrupt, you could wait till the person's done speaking, but then probe, because you know.
Skill you're looking for or you know the experience you're looking for, the person may not naturally say it. So it's important for you to then ask the question listen to the answer, and not just say, oh yeah, they got it wrong. But then to probe one or two times to say, okay, maybe they weren't thinking like I was, and get that information.
So that's really important as an interviewer, you know you've got a job, you know what you need, but it's not simple. When you interview that.
The person's gonna tell you, oh, you need this. Here's how I did it. Your job is to listen and probe for those things.
[00:24:30] Dave Travers: It sounds like the best tip to become a better interviewer is to start a podcast so you can get practic interview people just
[00:24:46] Sunita Holzer: like you, Dave. Yeah, just like you. That's what you're doing.
[00:25:00] Dave Travers: A plus answer. A plus answer. Sunita Sunita. It is so clear why you're a talent all star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
[00:25:10] Sunita Holzer: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
[00:25:15] Dave Travers: That's Sunita Holzer, CHRO at Verisk. We'll put our LinkedIn profile in the episode description, and as a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube as well on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email to talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All Stars, and we'll see you right back here next time.