Octapharma Plasma operates donor centers nationwide, supplying critical plasma used in treatments that impact patients daily. Leading the talent strategy behind this essential work is Monte Garrett, Director of Talent Acquisition. His leadership philosophy is founded on a framework he mastered as a teenager: the strategic discipline of chess. Monte's mentor taught him to approach every business challenge like a position on the chessboard, requiring deep anticipation, measured discipline, and constant adjustment.
In this episode of Talent All Stars, Monte shares how this viewpoint shapes their approach to hiring, workforce planning, and managing organizational change. He explains why Talent Acquisition must evolve into a consultative discipline, using data to challenge assumptions and guide the business with authority.
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[00:00:00] Monte Garrett: Chess positions evolve with every move. And so why would we not think about business the same way when business conditions are constantly changing?
[00:00:06] Dave Travers: 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.
Our guest today is Monte Garrett, Director of Talent Acquisition at Octapharma Plasma, one of the nation's leading plasma collection companies, and part of a global organization helping produce life-saving therapies for patients around the world. Over the past few years, Monte's been leading a 26-person team supporting Octapharma's rapid growth, hiring, onboarding, and retaining the people who make its donor centers run safely and efficiently.
Monte's journey into leadership began more than two decades ago as a teenager. There's a great story behind that. So let's get into it now. Monte Garrett, welcome to Talent All Stars.
[00:01:05] Monte Garrett: Thank you for having me, Dave. I appreciate it.
[00:01:09] Dave Travers: Delighted to have you here today. And one of the things I've heard you talk about before that I'd love to start with is I heard you talk about that a mentor of yours taught you to think about business like a game of chess, and I love chess, so I would love to hear as a overarching framework, as you think about talent and all the things that we'll dive into today, how does chess work as a framework to think through business challenges that you face?
[00:01:30] Monte Garrett: Yeah, so this actually started at the right old age of 16. That's when I took my first leadership role. My business mentor at the time asked me do I play chess? And at the time I didn't. I told him, Nope, I'm a checkers player. I can absolutely outmatch you in checkers. And so he told me, you need to learn chess.
If you're gonna be successful in business, you really need to understand chess. And so I didn't know what he meant at first, but then he began to explain it to me as the years went on in that mentor-mentee relationship. And I really learned how strategic chess is and how the strategic parts of it relate to business.
So when you think about planning as it in respect to chess. The same thing applies to business. You have to be a planner. You have to understand positioning, and you have to be able to anticipate your competitors. And what is their next move gonna be? How do they think you've gotta manage calculated risks? Just like you do in chess, and sometimes you have to manage the game, so to speak, with limited resources.
And so for all those reasons, he related business to chess. And it's something that I actually teach people now when I mentor others, is how to navigate the political waters of business and how to use chess as an analogy. To help you navigate.
[00:02:57] Dave Travers: Do you remember back to the first time you applied that, you know, and when, as it obviously spoke to you as a concept, but it's one thing to like have somebody make a good point and be like, oh yeah, that's interesting, but then to still be thinking about it, applying it and talking to other people about it still today, how do you think about that?
Do you remember the first moment that you decided to use a chess strategy to move forward?
[00:03:18] Monte Garrett: I do remember the first time, ironically, and that first time I mentioned to you that I learned about the analogy was when I was 16. Well, Dave, that was many, many moons ago.
[00:03:29] Dave Travers: Couple years ago.
[00:03:30] Monte Garrett: However, I do still remember, even the first time, and my first concern with going into a leadership role at such a young age was I'm managing about 50 people that are much older than me and had much more experience than me. And so I needed to understand how to leverage their knowledge, that institutional knowledge that they brought.
The first thing that I learned was about how the different positions move. That's the first thing they teach you in chess. What does each position do? How can you move each position? What is their function? And so I needed to understand the function of the people that reported up to me directly and how they thought and how they move, so that I could learn to apply their movements to the game that we call Rick Home Center, which was the job that I had at the time.
And so that was really my first time is really understanding and leveraging the people that worked for me that actually came to the table with much more experience than I.
[00:04:34] Dave Travers: So now, as you started to map out the chessboard and see the different pieces and different people moving around it, when did you realize you wanted to be a different piece?
When did you start to see yourself as being a leader, and how did being a leader in talent acquisition come about?
[00:04:50] Monte Garrett: Yeah, I actually noticed that back in school. It was before I even started working that I knew. I wanted to be in leadership. Oftentimes, I saw that I took the lead in even daily activities and games, and things of that nature as a kid.
And so, I knew, and also looking at my parents and the example that they set, both of them were in leadership roles as well at early ages. And in hearing them talk about leadership and understanding what it really meant to be a leader is what made me say, yep, this is definitely for me. I knew that I didn't want to be an individual contributor.
I wanted to be able to have a larger impact, and that's really been my focus for just about every role that I've taken since I've been in leadership. I wanna make sure that my reach is a lot farther than what I can do on my own. And I know you can only achieve that through us.
[00:05:43] Dave Travers: Yes. Amen to that. The thing about leadership that I love, you're talking about there is on that last point is thinking about not how can I achieve something and get others to do it for me, but how do I achieve it through others?
How do you think about applying that today? So now you're in this business context, you're at Octapharma, and you know you have big teams, big hiring goals. How do you apply that today? Gimme an example of leading through others.
[00:06:12] Monte Garrett: I have four direct reports. My organization here at Octapharma is a team of 26, but there are four people who report to me directly.
I try to make sure that everything that I do is pouring into those four leaders that will in turn pour into the other people that report into them directly. And so I've always been a proponent of development and making sure that my leaders know what it means to lead teams and not just manage teams.
And so that's really what I've done as a leader, is made sure that there were development plans that aligned with those leaders' aspirations. What do you want to do in life? Not just business, but what do you want to do in life? And then tying those two together, business with life, and making sure that they understand my help for you is not just with Octapharma plasma.
My help for you is going to help you with what you're trying to achieve in life. Hopefully, you can do that in tandem while you're working here at Octapharma as well. We can have both of those tracks moving in a positive direction.
[00:07:20] Dave Travers: I love that. So if that's new for someone, that sounds so great as an emerging leader, to be someone who fills other people up and helps people achieve not just what they want at work, but in life.
How do I start down that path? Like, give me an advice as an emerging leader who wants to be filling other people up, how do you get somebody to start talking about life and then connect that to the things we need to do together at work?
[00:07:43] Monte Garrett: I try to use myself as an example first. And so for me, what it took for me is understanding two things: what am I passionate about, and then what do I also have the skills for as well?
And so for me, I was passionate about helping other people with their careers early on in life. When I was in high school, and I worked for Ricker Home Center, people always knew they could come to me to help them find a job, and so I thrived from that. That's what I fed off of, was helping people to find their next career move.
And then I also had the skills. I knew how to do it. I observed people doing it. I took the good pieces away from everyone who I interacted with. I left behind the bad stuff, so I would imitate the things that made other people successful, other leaders successful when it came to hiring and helping with career paths.
And I imitated those things. And so when I'm helping others, I try to help them follow the same path. I'll ask them questions about what are you passionate about? And that doesn't have to just relate to business, that can be in life. What are the things that you love doing? What do you enjoy the most? When you're doing it, and it doesn't feel like work.
And then I try to marry that up with their skills and say, you also have this skillset that would lend itself to the things that you're passionate about. And then we start moving in that direction because I know that if you have those two things, then you will be successful at whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish.
[00:09:19] Dave Travers: I think that is such wise counsel, and I think it's also a great way to evaluate people when you're interviewing them to think about in life, where are your skills and where are your passions and where do they overlap? That is a roadmap to figuring out who's gonna be successful on your potential team member and also on your current team member.
And I love how you frame that up. As you think about it now at Octapharma, so you've had all this amazing experience. PetSmart worked at so many different places and had so many different roles. Now at Octapharma, how do you apply that in thinking about all the challenges that you have in a world like in healthcare, where there labor shortages and structural challenges of finding all the right people? How do you apply those skills today?
[00:10:02] Monte Garrett: I think I'll take you right back to the analogy of the chess board on this one, because. Again, I often relate business to chess. So when I look at the chessboard that is Octapharma, I always think about constant adaptation. You don't want that lazy dog syndrome. You don't wanna be complacent.
You have to continue to evolve, right? Chess positions evolve with every move. And so why would we not think about business the same way when business conditions are constantly changing? So when we think about economies and technology, and workforce expectations, all those things will not survive unchanged.
They have to change. And so having that constant adaptation has helped me here at Octapharma, and not just being complacent. I think another way to look at this is. When you play chess, you tend to think back at the game that you just finished, and you try to learn from each game, right? And so for business, when you have projects that happen and or things are happening within your organization, I try to make sure that I'm always reflective and that I'm looking back to see how did this game play out?
What can I learn from this, and how do I adapt in the future with my next game or my next move? And so I think those are important relations to my role here at Octapharma, and again, that chessboard. There's one last thing I would mention, also, Dave, and that's positioning and timing. So when I think about chess, right, a strong chess player, they gain advantages when they position themselves before they attack, right?
It's not always just about the attack, it's about how do you position yourself. Business is the same way. There's marketing positions, there's employer branding, product timing. It's more than just an aggressive action. Sometimes best move is preparatory, not really aggressive, and in nature. And so having that well-timed entry, in my opinion, I think it often beats a rush to launch. So those were the, the ways that I related that is money.
[00:12:16] Dave Travers: Something's super interesting. 'Cause I think the rush to launch is so much of the conventional wisdom today is like, change for change's sake. If you're not changing, you're losing. And there's some truth in some, you know, the world is constantly changing.
We have to adapt, but those preparatory moves are often overlooked as a result, that lead to so much success and so much advantage later. Give us an example, like how do you think about if you're gonna make a big change or launch a big project or something, what's a preparatory move that you would think about to improve your positioning on the chess board before you launch into something?
[00:12:52] Monte Garrett: Yeah. I'll give you a great example. When I first came here to Octapharma. I was tasked with centralizing recruiting. At the time, we only had eight recruiters on staff, and the field recruited for their own line staff and their own frontline staff. And so with bringing recruiting in-house, the business said, Hey, we'd like for you to do this in six months.
And so I said, wait a minute. I feel like a task this large is probably gonna take at least 12 months to achieve. And so I was able to really explain the behind-the-scenes work that has to happen in order to centralize, and then also in order to manage the change to the organization. And so really understanding the leadership team at that point and knowing when I can push back and when it's appropriate to push back, but giving them the data behind why we should not do this in such a rushed fashion.
I think it really opened up the eyes to the business to see this is an area that if we fail and if we do it in six months, we're gonna fail fast. But if we fail, we could lose some of the trust that the field has in us as corporate office employees. And so I think once I, the entire process, the thought that takes into actually centralizing a recruiting function that has never been centralized.
For an organization this size that hires this many people, it really started to make sense for the business, and so we started to navigate that change a lot differently than the business proposed initially. Again, all of that came from chess logic. I had to learn the players very quickly when I first came on board, and I also needed to understand how to move with each one of these players, which player probably wouldn't appreciate pushback.
Who could I actually use to serve as my own mouthpiece in the rooms that I didn't sit in yet that could talk on behalf of me? So all of those things, again, came from that chess analogy in managing the business. Like chess, but that would be my, uh, first example here at Octapharma. That comes to mind.
[00:15:04] Dave Travers: That's so cool as an analogy, because I think when you're implementing change like that, where you're taking decentralized autonomy and bringing it into a central function like that, it can feel not just like change, but a loss of authority and freedom to people and control. And so when the impulse is to rip the band-aid off as quickly as possible, that can exacerbate that feeling.
And when you allow people to ease into it a little bit, you know, you can bring them along and make them feel like, okay, we're gonna take this one step at a time. It might not be quite as bad as I anticipated. And then even you start to get like. Oh, it's kind of nice that we're all speaking the same language.
It's kind of nice that I get to leverage the central resources of the entire company and not just have to do every little task myself.
[00:15:51] Monte Garrett: Absolutely. I agree a hundred percent, Dave.
[00:15:54] Dave Travers: So as you think about that and apply that, now we're in this world where AI and technology are all around us and being talked about every single day, and of course, it impacts TA and the world of talent.
How do you think about where to start implementing the next change? That is an opportunity to use technology even smarter. And where do you think about, you know, that's not something we need to do today. What's your framework for thinking those sorts of things through?
[00:16:23] Monte Garrett: For me, AI is all about creating efficiencies.
It's not a substitute for anything. It's really an assistant or an enhancement. And that's how I use AI. I use it as an enhancement to what we currently do. I fully embrace AI. I know there are many of my peers that are a little leery, even still about AI, but it's not going anywhere. And I knew this early on when it first started coming out that we would need to embrace it, but responsibly and that just like any other technology, we can embrace it and make sure that we put the bumper guards around it, and we use it responsibly.
And that's exactly what we do. So it helps us with efficiencies such as time to fill. It helps us to find candidates that are highly qualified, much quicker than we would if we were doing it manually. So it's great in that respect, but it does not take out the human interaction. It doesn't take out the human intelligence.
I'm a part of SHRM, the Society of Human Resources Management. Johnny C. Taylor is the CEO. He talks a lot about AI. Plus AI, human intelligence equals ROI. You can't have them. They're not mutually exclusive. You need them together. And so while AI can handle the analytics piece and help functions like mine, like talent acquisition, you still need a decision maker.
You still need that human interaction to be able to balance things, make sure there are no biases that are within the coding and that we're not eliminating any populations of EEOC categories, unjustly, from the questions or the keyword searches. And so we just have to use it responsibly as a business.
And that's what we're doing here at Octapharma Plasmas. We've already begun this journey, and when I first came on board, I was tasked with selecting a new applicant tracking system, and it's very heavily weighted with AI. So we are already on this path, and we're embracing it, and we're explaining to the business so that they can adapt to the change as well.
[00:18:35] Dave Travers: So as you think about your team, as you embrace a new applicant tracking system and other changes that AI will bring, when you get to that human intelligence part of the equation that you, you know, abut through efficiency, as you say, you know, you're freeing up the team to do more of the ai because the AI will take away some of the mundane stuff.
What are the skills that you and your team and all of us in talent are gonna need even more of? As some of those tasks are taken away by AI over time.
[00:19:04] Monte Garrett: I'm so glad you asked this question. I am on my soapbox constantly here at Octapharma talking about the pivot that TA is gonna need to take going forward, where it's no longer just order takers.
We're filling requisitions as we get an order for a job, but it's more consultative. So, making that switch to be consultants to the business, using data to help the business make data-driven decisions, is gonna be so much more important. And that's the pivot that we're making here at OPI is we're teaching our recruiters not just the recruiting skills that they need or how to use keyword searches or AI, and within our applicant tracking system, we're teaching them to be consultants, how to listen.
How to advise the business in situations where you may not have formal authority over the people that you're advising. So teaching them those kinds of skills, how to influence without having that formal authorit,y becomes even more critical in this state.
[00:20:08] Dave Travers: Could not agree more. And I think that exactly to your point, if you come to a hiring manager who's like, listen, I have this role that just opened up.
I need to fill it right away. If instead of saying, Okay, we'll do it, you say, Hey, you know, as I think back about the past five rules we've filled for you, what's interesting to me is something like. The two that were the most controversial for the final decision, where we weren't sure, and there were disagreements about who to hire, have been the two home runs over the past couple years, and the three where there was total consensus, it was the right candidate haven't done as well.
What should we learn from that, and how do we apply that to this search? Or some insight like that. Like that is the gold that makes you into this consultative partner to the hiring manager in the business, rather than someone who's just the order taker to your point.
[00:20:55] Monte Garrett: And Dave, I'll be remiss if I didn't, again, tie this back to chess, right? Because this is the post-mortem. This is, Hey, let's look back at the last five decisions that we've made for this role and evaluate them, and see how we need to make an adjustment going forward. It all goes back to chess.
[00:21:13] Dave Travers: I love it. Okay. We always end these episodes with the lightning round. So I, when I ask you a question where the conceit is that the CEO of Octapharma is, you know, making a cup of coffee next to you in the kitchen or is hops in the elevator and you have 60 seconds and the CEO turns to you and says, Monte, I spend a lot of my time interviewing both people internally and externally for different opportunities, but you're the interviewing, you're the expert in talent. Gimme your one best tip to make me a. Better interviewer, what would you say?
[00:21:44] Monte Garrett: Often, when I'm doing an interview and training, I always highlight the need to make sure that the candidate is comfortable. Interviewing is one of the top three most stressful things that you can do in life, behind public speaking and marriage.
And so anything that you can do as an interviewer to make that person feel more at ease and more comfortable. Going to give you a better read and a clearer picture of who they are and what they bring to the table. So if you can make them relax in any way, by your body language, by your, the smile that you have on your face, your tone of voice, anything that's gonna make them feel more comfortable, you're gonna get the true sense of who they are and what skills they bring.
However, the more uncomfortable they are and the more nervous they are, they will immediately close up, and they will not give you the information that you're looking for. So if there's one technique that I can say would make a person extremely successful in interviews, it's your ability to relate to that candidate and make them feel so comfortable that they almost forget that they're in an actual interview, and it feels more like a good conversation.
[00:22:59] Dave Travers: That is such good advice because the real person you're gonna be working with and experiencing on whether they're a good member of the team is not gonna be nearly as nervous as the person sitting in front of you. So how do you break that down so you get a sense of who's the real person and get the information revealed, which is a favor of them, not just in the moment to make them more.
Make it a more pleasant experience and conversation, but a favor to them to give them the sense of allowing you and allowing them to see what it's like to really work together a little bit more, works out better for everybody. I love that. That's it, Monte Garrett, it is very clear why you're a talent all-star.
Thank you so much for joining us today and taking the time. Like the good folks at Chick-fil-A say, Dave, it was my pleasure.
That's Monte Garrett, Director of Talent Acquisition at Octapharma Plasma. We'll include his LinkedIn profile in the episode description below. And just a reminder, you can watch the full video versions of these conversations on YouTube on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future guests, send us an email to talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. We'll see you right back here next time.