Talent All-Stars

The Warehouse Automation Giant That Treats Every Hire as a Business Decision

Episode Notes

Every product you order online passes through a warehouse. Someone decided how that warehouse runs. Dematic builds the systems that make it happen, and when you're operating at that scale, the difference between the right hire and the wrong one isn't just an HR problem — it's a business problem.

Jenny Ferrell knows this better than most. She started her career recruiting engineers for a small, privately held firm in Phoenix, competing for talent against companies with bigger brands, bigger budgets, and bigger offices. She figured out how to find the right person for a business that couldn't afford to get it wrong, and that ability followed her all the way to Senior VP of HR at one of the world's leading supply chain automation companies.

Today, she shares the framework she uses to turn talent acquisition from a transactional function into a strategic driver of business results and the hard lesson she learned when she skipped the process and went straight to the solution.

You'll also hear: 

Connect with Jenny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-ferrell-53b832a5

Learn more about Dematic: www.dematic.com

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Episode Transcription

[00:00:00] Jenny Ferrell: You look at alignment to the business values, alignment to the business culture, alignment to the business future as to what is it that we actually need, and using the talent acquisition and recruiting organization as a key strategic arm to be able to meet those business results. So 

[00:00:17] Dave Travers: 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 all-star is Jenny Ferrell, Senior VP of HR at Dematic, a global leader in warehouse automation and supply chain technology.

She's earned her way into that seat by starting in recruiting, leaning into hard problems, and pursuing her interest rather than a career checklist. Today, we'll discuss that journey. Jenny also shares a hard-won lesson, a project that didn't go as planned, the feedback that came with it, and how it completely reshaped the way she thinks about adopting new technology.

Jenny Ferrell, welcome to Talent All-Stars. 

[00:01:05] Jenny Ferrell: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Dave. 

[00:01:07] Dave Travers: So great to have you. So much to talk about. And first, though, before we get to all the amazing stuff and all the leadership you're doing now, before you were, uh, a leader in, in the HR and talent world, I wanna get to way back.

When did the HR and people team journey start for you, and when did you get the feeling like, "Oh, this might not be just the thing I'm doing right now," like, "I could really see myself doing this and loving it"? 

[00:01:36] Jenny Ferrell: Yeah. Honestly, Dave, it's looking in retrospect 'cause there wasn't just a moment. It was how my work changed.

You know, I think about at one point it was... it felt like, very transactional, very much like just, you know, going in, doing the job every single day like we all do. And then as I look back, I thought about how taking on more challenges, you know, leaning in a bit more instead of, like, those really tough situations versus sitting back and stepping back and letting others do it, and then also when it felt like you were making an impact.

You know, I think about when I wasn't planning to be in HR, honestly. I was that teenager that didn't know what they wanted to do. I think at one point I thought I wanted to be an accountant and realized that that was definitely not the profession for me. Uh, even though I love my accountant and appreciate him wholeheartedly, I thought that the impact piece and really wanting to go after those tough situations.

And when I got into HR, really early on, it was in recruiting. And with recruiting, you felt like you could see the immediate impact of you, you find the right talent, you get, you know, them into the organization, you see the value that they're creating, and then as you look back and you had the numbers to meet for hiring was the transactional aspect.

But then, when you actually felt the impact of that hire was when I really felt like, wow, this is something that I can see myself doing long term and actually feel like it's something that I would find meaningful and something that I would really, you know, want to progress further in as I think about it.

The other piece of it is that then I stopped thinking about titles or roles or that linear progression that they always tell you in school of, you know, you gotta go from ladder rung one, two, three, or four into, again, just what are the experiences that I'm hoping to get or wanting to create versus that very traditional linear path. Then it felt like, okay, this is something for me. 

[00:03:32] Dave Travers: Yes. So I wanna go back to the beginning of that 'cause I love this, where you talked about how you discovered that HR isn't something where you just lean back and observe. It's where you get to lean in a little bit more, especially when there's a difficult situation.

I don't think for people outside of HR, they might not realize that, that they might view their experience of HR might be that it's somebody who just makes sure the rules are followed and lets the company run unless something goes wrong. Talk a little bit more about that. How is, you know, being on the people team and doing HR a license to lean into the difficulty, and wh- why does that become something that's satisfying in a career path that called to you?

[00:04:09] Jenny Ferrell: I think that, you know, HR, maybe when it was first born, was, was very much in the, I would say, the governance, the policies, ensuring that a company or employees follow the rules, which are all extremely important. We all need to have a governance side of every role we play because we all have things to follow, rules to play by.

But where I found the change in this was when those pieces of the governance model were applied. You know, most companies follow this extremely well. They do a very nice job of it. And honestly, as we think about how things progress, this is gonna become probably much more automated and less of an employee experience and a conversation when it comes to those governance items.

So when I was thinking about my career earlier on, the part where I was leaning into was when we needed to hire brand new talent that maybe we've never hired before, people that we didn't even know, especially when I was, I was part of an engineering company that was a privately owned, very small company, and they were trying to attract people that were wanting to be at much bigger firms in a very competitive market.

I was actually in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time, and that was extremely competitive. Lots of different industries, and working for a small, privately held engineering company wasn't as exciting as it as maybe some of the other companies in the area. So seeing that as a challenge and seeing that as something that I could impact was much more meaningful to me than just to put in the recruiting process or making sure I had the n- right number of calls a day or, you know, all of those items that you have as a recruiter, but actually seeing the win of that value added hire, like I said earlier.

So I think that seeing that as a challenge, even though the company didn't necessarily say, "Okay, Jenny, here's a challenge, go solve it." But to be able to recognize it and then be able to lean into it versus just sitting back and doing what I was told of make a certain number of calls, make a certain number of hires, reach that quota per month, really taking that the step forward and making sure it was the right talent that added the right value.

[00:06:12] Dave Travers: I love that. So I think, you know, lots of people come up through HR through different paths to leading an HR function, recruiting clearly one of them. But a lot of time it's not recruiting where somebody has experience in. As a head of HR or chief people officer or chief human resources officer, what is it that somebody who's ascended to that level but never worked in recruiting, what would your, like, top one or two pieces of advice be about managing the recruiting function when it's new to you that you might not appreciate coming from some other part of HR as you work your way up?

[00:06:46] Jenny Ferrell: Yeah, I would say that the recruiting aspect, so if you've never done recruiting or you've never been a recruiter, I think that it's easy to automatically put it into just hire people, hire people, hire people. And I think that the biggest advice that I would give myself if I could look back in, in my early days in recruiting and then for a leader who takes on recruiting for the first time, maybe never having led recruiting, is to understand that recruiting is just an action and a transaction.

And this is where really thinking about what kind of outcome do we want, and then tying it back to the business results. Because I think that at times we've always considered about attracting and retaining talent, which is what every company wants to do. But when we think about the next level of it being extremely strategic to an organization, this is where you look at alignment to the business values, alignment to the business culture, alignment to the business future as to what is it that we actually need, and using the talent acquisition and recruiting organization as a key strategic arm to be able to meet those business results.

And I think at times we sometimes throw it over the wall to recruiting to say, "Just go recruit, hire the people, figure it out." And we really don't partner in a strategic way to outline with them, "Here's where we're going. Here's why we're going. Here's how you make the business impact." And I know even though I started recruiting, I was guilty of that when I took on a broader HR role, 'cause my recruiting days were so far behind me when I got into more senior HR leadership.

So it's something where I think we really have to make sure that we realize that the strategic aspect of recruiting, that sometimes we don't always remember, 'cause we get into the transactional, just hire, hire, hire, especially when we're in high demand in a tough market. 

[00:08:35] Dave Travers: I love that, and I think that opens up perfectly to, to reverse the question, which is rather than to answer the way you just did, to think about what is an HR leader who doesn't know recruiting, how do they take that on?

If you're a young, ambitious recruiter like you were, and you're looking at Jenny and saying, "Oh, wow, that's what I wanna be. I wanna work my all the way up and run the HR function," you know, what, what advice do you give then? And when you hear people give advice like saying, "Align yourself to the business," which is exactly right, but I don't know what that is as a starting recruiter.

Like, how do I channel that into something tactical that I can do as an individual contributor today that will lead me to being a leader tomorrow? 

[00:09:16] Jenny Ferrell: Two pieces of advice I would give an individual in, in that seat, and even thinking back to myself in, in that moment of advice I got from leaders as well is, number one, it, it, it's gonna sound so fundamental and nothing earth-shattering, but relationships.

Building that trust and building the credibility and getting to know who you're working with is so important. And the second aspect of that that ties right into it is the mentality of you don't have to do it, but you choose to do it, and that's the part where at times I feel like we were told early in our career we have a checklist of things we have to do, okay?

You have to get a mentor. You have to get your SHRM certification. You have to do all these things, and versus I choose to do certain things and certain experiences that will help me develop in my career and be extremely intentional in building those relationships and learning from others because that was one of the biggest pieces of try to do it by yourself, and not building that network and not building the relationships was huge.

And even today, I find that, you know, getting on a plane and meeting our people around the world and listening and hearing from them, I learn so much more in those conversations than trying to do it by myself. Or also just trying to make sure that I am encompassing all these different types of experiences and not just working from a checklist or from a I have to do it, but that I want to do it, and I choose to do this because of the fact that I know what kind of experiences I wanna create for myself.

[00:10:48] Dave Travers: I love that, the have to do it versus want to do it, and I think the checklist you're talking about is exactly how someone could fall into just doing the have to do it. Like, what are the urgent things that I for sure need to do to accomplish in letting doing those, and even doing those excellently or better than everyone else, but not making the time for the want to do it, like learning about the business from lots of different people.

I think that is so wise. If I'm listening to this and thinking like, "Oh, wow, I'm the number one recruiter on my team. I fill the most reqs, but I, now that I think of it, I don't even know where to start on the, like, what's the want to do stuff. How, how would you advise somebody to even get that snowball rolling downhill?

[00:11:32] Jenny Ferrell: The want to do piece is assessing yourself as well. So I think that that's one of the things I wish that I would've done earlier career, was really sit down and assess what are the things that you care about. You know, what are the things that are of value to you? Because when it gets to have to do, which is gonna sound terrible, but it's a lot of those things that you don't want to do.

And then it makes it no fun, and then it feels like a chore and work, and no longer like we talked about earlier, an actual career. So if you take those moments to really reflect as to what are the things that have really energized you, and that's usually the coaching I give to people that I work with at our early career, is like, really think about the things that really energize you.

What conversations did you have this week that really got you interested? That, like I said earlier, like made you lean in and made you wanna learn more. And then when you reflect on those moments and the people that actually energized you or that you were like, "Wow, I'd love to learn more about that person or that career," really reflect on those conversations, then take the action of setting up those meetings.

So there, you know, the worst thing that someone's gonna tell you is that they don't have time, they can't do it, and they won't prioritize it. You're not gonna be any worse off than you were before you asked the question. So I think that that was the other thing I would say is that courage to be bold.

And a lot of times those leaders that are good leaders will recognize that and say, "Wow. Hey, thanks so much for reaching out. I appreciate this. I might not be able to meet in the next few weeks, but hey, let's meet next quarter. I'm gonna be in that area at that time, and let's set up lunch, let's set up coffee."

And that's why I think those relationships are so important, and this is where I go back to where I'd start off with if I was a brand-new recruiter, early careers. Take that real moment to think about what it is that you care about. What are those moments that sparked your interest in the last few weeks?

Who are the people that inspired you that you wanted to learn more about? And develop those relationships, like I said earlier. Make those connections, get those perspectives, and then that's how you can build the momentum, and that's really easy to do. That doesn't require a textbook to learn that. You don't have to go to a training course to do that, to reflect on those pieces, or to make those connections. You can do that tomorrow if you'd like to. 

[00:13:41] Dave Travers: There's so much wisdom there. So one Like looking at your calendar and saying, "What are the three meetings this week? Or what are the three time blocks that I'm really looking forward to?" And if they're not there, like create them. That is so smart. It will, it will gear not to just the benefit of your career, but your whole outlook on work and everything like that.

I think that's great. And two, just ask the person exactly to your point, even if they're like the demanding person. If you're a recruiter filling reqs for a bunch of hiring managers, like going to the one who's hardest to please and saying, "Hey, I just want you to know, like I recognize you have higher standards than everyone else I work with, and I wanna hear more about that.

Like, we're always tactically in the weeds of the next role you need filled, but I wanna hear about the best recruiter you've ever had and what made them different. And I would love to take you out to coffee for 15 minutes to do that or whatever." Like, even if they say no, they're gonna be impressed that you asked that question.

[00:14:35] Jenny Ferrell: Exactly, and like I said, it's like you're no better off. You're at the exact same space you were when you started doing this. And when they do say yes, which I think many leaders will, you'll just gain so much more knowledge and perspective, and it's something that I, I found extremely valuable. Your own perspective is not enough.

You need other people's perspectives, especially if you wanna be in the human resources space. This is not a space for those that wanna be alone. You definitely need to build those connections. 

[00:15:02] Dave Travers: I think that's right, and I think the other, the other thing is somebody's coming up through an organization, is we often talk about how do we get a seat at the table?

How am I seen as somebody who's accepted at the next level of the organization in a cross-functional, you know, environment or something like that? If you wanna be, feel accepted, and be seen as accepted, if you've gone out to coffee with 50% of the people who are already at that table, boy, it's gonna feel a lot different to them and to you to have you be at that table.

[00:15:29] Jenny Ferrell: Exactly. Exactly. And that's where, you know, I would say from my seat as to what I said earlier around leaning into these tough situations, leaning into those tough leaders to where you may feel the most uncomfortable, you'll probably learn the most, honestly. You'll probably get the best and most constructive feedback that will help you in your career when you lean into those individuals that maybe make you the most uncomfortable because they are, you know, tough and demanding, uh, hopefully in a respectful way.

[00:15:55] Dave Travers: Jenny, give me an example. So if I'm that person who makes you uncomfortable, and you, you, all of a sudden we're in a meeting about whatever, and you realize this is gonna be one of those tough conversations, how do you break the ice? 'Cause I think, like, being five minutes into the tough conversation isn't what people worry about. It's the first five seconds. Like, how do you even start that? 

[00:16:13] Jenny Ferrell: Yeah. I would say that the most disarming thing to do is probably come in with some sort of personality piece that is, shows your empathy. And that might sound a bit scary as well, because, at least this works for me, and everybody is of course different, and you need to make sure you start off with what's authentic to you and what works for you.

But for me personally, I found that starting off with something personal and thinking about the empathy of what is this person, where are they coming from? You know, what is it that they're dealing with? And a lot of times, the managers that are in these situations that might feel super extremely demanding, they're probably in a very stressful state of they need to build resources, they need to build talent.

So if you go in with an empathetic perspective and some of that personal touch, that will completely usually let down a guard and let the person know that you're there for them. And I don't mean to go in with the question of, "Hey, what can I do to help you?" Or, "I'm here to help," but to go in with your research done.

So when I go in with some of these tough leaders or external partners where I need to negotiate or work through or I'm trying to make sure I build that partnership, making sure you've done your homework, understand that person's function. Understand what that person's needs are. Maybe talk to a few people around that person to get a little bit of intel.

And then when you go in with that thoughtful conversation, then you can be much more prepared and have a bit of empathy as to where that person's starting off with. And then you can win a little bit of credit when you go in with that knowledge and that experience, and also making sure you ask the right questions that show that you care about the business and you show that you care about where that person is, versus a generic, 'How can I help you?' and 'How are you doing?' or 'Did you have a nice weekend?' 

[00:17:59] Dave Travers: If you're speaking to somebody who runs some important part of the business and say, "Man, the goals that we have and you especially have that this company's counting on you for are really high, and I feel like I'm not contributing enough to helping you achieve those goals.

And I also have some ideas about how you could help and me to help me, uh, help achieve those goals. But first, like, clearly we gotta get from three new heads per month filled up to at least 10," or, you know, whatever it is. Like, all of a sudden, wow, you've started off the conversation making it clear exactly to your point.

You know exactly what the stress level is and open it up, and it's not so general as like, "I haven't thought about this before. What can I do for you?" I, I love that framework. 

[00:18:45] Jenny Ferrell: And then the vulnerability you talked about, Dave, as well is say, hey, call it out where I feel like maybe I'm not meeting your expectations.

Sometimes, even starting off with that vulnerability 'cause that leader may not even realize that they're projecting that. And you may find out that you actually are meeting expectations, but maybe it's not clearly communicated where you guys are not maybe communicating in a safe way, and way too. So creating that, that area of vulnerability, everybody can relate to that.

Of course, there'll be some that maybe not react, you know, in the same vulnerable way, but creating vulnerability, acting with some empathy, trying to understand where that perspective is, doing your homework, and asking thoughtful questions can go extremely long way in building those relationships. 

[00:19:25] Dave Travers: I agree with that. And the other thing, the duality of vulnerability is it's both real, 'cause everybody feels vulnerable at some point, so you wanna tap into something that's real. But the other thing is it feels scary because you wanna be confident, when in fact, to the other person, being vulnerable is one of the most confidence-inspiring and confidence-giving things you can do.

When you just say, "Wow, I feel like I'm under-delivering for you, and I wanna talk to you about it," and then you stop talking and let them fill the space afterwards, like, that comes across as a only a very confident person who, like, believes they're now going to solve this problem and figure out what to do is gonna say something like that.

[00:20:04] Jenny Ferrell: Exactly. Completely agree. 

[00:20:06] Dave Travers: Awesome. Okay, so now we're in this world where technology is everywhere. Technology's everywhere at Dematic in how you guys transform people's supply chains. It's everywhere in the world around us, as AI is the buzzword of the day. And all of us, including HR and talent leaders, are constantly being asked by our own teams, by candidates, by hiring managers, by our supervisors, how are we going to implement more technology and better technology to achieve even better results even more efficiently?

And so you're in the middle of doing exactly that for your customers as an organization, and you, like all of us, are being asked to do that, and we're flooded all the time with all these pitches about this technology is great. This colleague of mine at another company said this thing is great. Someone of my employees said this other thing is great.

How do you decide? What's your framework for, amidst the hundreds of technology things you could do to implement AI or automation or whatever the case may be, how do you create a framework to say, "We're gonna do this first, or we're gonna take on these three things, and these other 97 can wait"? 

[00:21:16] Jenny Ferrell: I, I feel like you were in our meeting earlier today, honestly, Dave. I feel like you're right there with us as an HR team because that's exactly what we're going through at the moment, is that there is a high demand for how do we take advantage of all the opportunities and technologies that are coming our way. And like you said, working for Dematic, which is an extremely interesting company, I mean, if you buy something today, if you interact with, you know, a retailer or something, we probably have done something to make sure that that product reaches you.

Like, we're in such a cool industry, and we need to make sure that we reflect that as an HR organization as well. Because when we're interacting with candidates, when we're interacting with the public, when we're interacting with schools, universities, and others, and they see what type of organization that Dematic is, and the fact that we are on the leading edge of automation as well as ensuring that supply chains move around the world in the fastest way possible, we need to make sure that HR does not hinder that by any means.

And this is where we have gotten lots of help, lots of recommendations from external parties, internal parties, and others. And we have decided as a team, number one is to think about how do we make sure our organization can accept and embrace this. Because to your point, we're all getting inundated from all sorts of areas, and what's real, what's not real, you know, what are we gonna get the most value for our dollars as well, because there's only so much money we can spend as well as a company, as well as an HR organization.

So what we've done is, number one, is say, okay, what can we actually prioritize as a team? Where are we gonna see the biggest value? But then also understand the effort, because our team has to be able to absorb this and be able to do the work. 'Cause it's not like we say, "Hey, AI, welcome in. Best of luck, and please fix our processes."

Right? Wouldn't that be awesome if we can do that? Maybe if we get like a humanoid or something that we can download all of our information into, that might be the future in a couple of decades. But for right now, it takes a huge amount of lift from our HR teams to even be able to implement these new ways of doing things.

So number one, we did the assessment of the enablement and the ability for us to even be able to take this all in. Number two, we are working through what are gonna be the biggest areas with the already well-vetted solutions out there. One of the things with Demandic, we're not one to always come in and do something that is highly risky because we know that our customers who have an end customer at the end of the day that needs to deliver to, we need to make sure we have a very confident and solid solution that we can deliver on.

And thankfully, within HR, AI is definitely not new. So we have a lot of vetted solutions that we can take our pick from as to how we wanna do it. So that's what we've done as our second step, and now we're working through actually how do we wanna implement this, with ensuring that we've got the right processes as well, the right inputs, and the right alignment with the business.

'Cause that's one of the other pitfalls I've found is that if we just try to put it in a new system, a new tool without the right processes and the right capability alignment, we could put in anything we want, but it's not gonna be successful. So we're really trying to make sure we do that homework as well.

So what we've done is definitely try to make sure that there's business impact, business alignment, and making sure that us as an HRT reflects our business values as to where do we wanna go as an organization. 

[00:24:37] Dave Travers: I think that that last part of making sure the processes fit that is a really hard piece of this because it is so easy in theory to look at the demo of the new product or, you know, new piece of technology, and be like, "Oh, wow, that's amazing."

But then stepping back and say, "Oh, wow, that assumed three data points that we don't have systematized and two people who pick up the end product and then get all the value out of it that we don't have on our team today, so now what are we gonna do?" And so how do you think about that end part in a way that's realistic about how much time, how much resources?

Because that is often where these things fall down, is failing to figure out, like, we built this beautiful new piece of technology, and we forgot to think about how do we plug it into the beginning and the end of a process. 

[00:25:31] Jenny Ferrell: Yeah. Uh, unfortunately, I learned the hard way by actually trying this. So I was in my Americas role a few years ago, so I had the leadership for the Americas team, and I started an HR operations group to help to take off some of the workload from our HR business partners, so they can focus more on the business, especially as we're thinking about the way we could align across countries, align different pieces of the processes and tools.

So what I did in that situation was I built a team. I said, "Okay, hey, we're gonna cut off the process here. I'm gonna pick it up, and I'm gonna give it to this group. And best of luck. Okay, brand new leader, you don't know Nomatic, you don't know Kion, you don't know anything about us, but you've done this at other companies, so I hope you can figure it out for us."

So after about a year of that, I got a lot of feedback from my team, which I truly appreciated getting that feedback firsthand because my vision of this was very long-term, and I'd seen it at other companies, and I thought, "Hey, this should be easy. Let's just do this." So I actually learned the hard way through an experience that, fortunately, my team was very gracious to work through that with me and give me the feedback, and let us work through it.

So now with that experience we learned, we're trying to make this more at a global scale and across more complex regions like Europe, which we know has many more complications to consider, actually not complications, but requirements to consider as we go country by country. So, unfortunately, I learned the hard way.

Now we're being very thoughtful about starting with what is the work and the process first. Now we're doing an inventory of that. What are some of the things we see common across? And then thinking about, you know, what do we wanna put as our requirements for our vendor as to how do we work through this?

Versus starting with here's the org, here's the vendor, here's the tool, best of luck. And so now we're doing it, I would say hopefully in a much more thoughtful way. We're not doing it as quickly as we did in North America, but we do think that working through this, we're gonna save some of the heartache we did in the Americas when we went the first time around.

[00:27:28] Dave Travers: Start with the end in mind. So smart. Uh, such a, such a hard earned by so many of us lesson that needs to be, in many cases, learned over and over again, but so smart. I love that. Okay. We always end these episodes, Jenny, with a lightning round. So I want you to as- presume that you're at headquarters or, you know, sitting around the office and, uh, taking the elevator up to the top floor or making a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and there it's just you and the CEO for 60 seconds.

And the CEO says, "Hey, Jenny, you know, I was thinking about the HR team the other day. How should we be measuring the effectiveness of HR for the next year or two? Like, what's the way we should measure your team's impact?" What would you say? 

[00:28:12] Jenny Ferrell: Yeah. Fortunately, I get that experience a lot because our CEO actually sits two offices down from me, so there's a lot of back and forth of these conversations.

And the couple of things that we have talked about this year, most importantly, is speed to impact and building of the new capabilities. And I know that doesn't sound exciting or anything that is innovative, but I would say most companies are probably struggling with that at the moment. Um, how do you ensure your speed of ramp up goes as quickly as possible?

Because you're hiring new talent, you're trying to build up new talent, and then also trying to understand how are you closing gaps that you may not even know what the gap is yet. Because of the technology race that's going so fast right now, we don't even know what skill sets we may need in five years from now, because there are gonna be new skill sets that are being created that we don't know how to even manage in some of these.

And so how do you get the right mindset and the right people that can build upon that as well, either by buying from the outside or building internally? So speed of impact, and then how are we closing those capability gaps? Those are the two that are the most important to our CEO at the moment. 

[00:29:18] Dave Travers: I don't think there's a CEO in the world who's like, "Yeah, speed, I don't, I don't care about that.

It doesn't matter how long it takes." Like that is... There's a 0% failure rate on pitching a CEO that we're gonna go faster and measure ourselves to make sure we do it. I love that. Um, okay. Jenny Ferrell, it is so clear why you're a talent all-star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today. 

[00:29:37] Jenny Ferrell: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

[00:29:43] Dave Travers: That's Jenny Ferrell. She's the SVP of HR and Sustainability at Dematic. We'll put her 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. And if you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com.

I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. See you back here next time