Global{M} had the pleasure of talking with Paul Else about life as a Head of Talent for BOLD, Barcelona.

Bold Valuable Tech is a company that aims to design, test, manufacture and deliver high-performance, finished battery and lightweight structure solutions. A large part of Bold’s team has developed their passion for precision and excellence while under the wings of Formula 1.

In this blog post, Paul Else talks about his work background, day-to-day life, main responsibilities, challenges and wins 🙌

1. Hey, Paul! First off can you tell us a bit about your job & what your company does?

Hi! I am currently Head of Talent Acquisition at BOLD Valuable Tech and am responsible for all the recruiting activities. 

Our company is designing and developing battery technologies for the future mobility market as well as providing engineering design services to F1 and Hypercar manufactures.

2. What is your background? How did you get into the industry?

I started as an engineer with Aston Martin and later transferred to agency recruitment. I wanted to stay in the engineering space but have more of a commercial role. Agency recruitment has changed significantly over the last 10 years, Tech recruiters back then were using a traditional sales-based approach, thinking about a number of calls and how to pitch clients and candidates. I looked at it a bit differently, I thought it would be better to train our people to understand technology in order to understand the problem better, match the candidates to the company and provide more creative solutions

That’s what I was working on for 5+ years. I started from being an entry-level recruiter to being a director reporting to ownership. We grew our turnover and headcount extensively, It was probably my most successful 5 years commercially.

I wanted to keep challenging myself and learn more and I really enjoyed all the ‘on-site’ activities that we were doing with our clients, so I decided I wanted to transition to in-house recruitment, allowing me to be closer to the engineering teams.

Internal recruitment back then in a lot of companies was managed by HR as opposed to Recruitment Specialists, and I was interested in trying it and seeing if my approach and methods would work within an in-house environment. I joined an automotive technology company called ClearMotion and built their internal Talent Acquisition processes from scratch. I was with them for around 3 years, up until the time when I joined BOLD Valuable Tech.

3. What does your typical workday schedule look like?

I wish I had a typical day, that would be great 😄 We are a team of 4 at the moment and I tend to start every morning with a team stand-up. We try to avoid meetings before 10 am and after 4 pm, to give our team members ownership and balance with their schedule. We discuss and assign key tasks for the day ahead and raise any issues we have, we try to make it productive. I then have a variety of meetings throughout the day with different people mainly focused on more strategic and company-wide topics.

I am still involved in coaching my team members on a day-to-day basis and helping them with recruitment delivery goals. A lot of people have their calendars fully booked with unnecessary meetings, so the first thing I did when I joined Bold Valuable Tech was to try to remove a lot of these meetings for my team. I don’t need to check–in on each team member individually on a daily basis, you hire someone and you need to give them trust. I have weekly 1:1s, and most of the time I let them lead the meeting and tell me how I can help, how their week went and what they plan to do next. We also look through the data from our ATS system and other sources. We try to be very data-driven in terms of informing what activities are the most valuable for them in the upcoming week, looking at their pipeline, and looking at their offers.

I try to leave 15% – 20% of my calendar empty for getting work done and the things that might come up.

Paul Else

I still enjoy doing hands-on recruitment. I don’t have a list of vacancies that I work on, but I am very much involved in strategic recruitment and the hiring of senior roles. I also like to partner with my recruiters, so they can gradually learn and feel more confident doing executive recruitment.

4. What do you consider the greatest achievements to date?

I think my time at Apex Recruitment Services was very successful, we outcompeted a lot of the competition on the market at that point, and we secured some exclusive contracts with big companies. We kind of reinvented the wheel a little bit internally, trying to train recruiters to be industry experts giving them engineering training rather than sales training.

I am equally proud of the Diversity and Inclusion program that we implemented at Clear Motion. It was adopted across the whole company with great success. We had weekly meetings, presentations, and workshops that were hosted by volunteering colleagues. We were talking about our cultural backgrounds, things that we enjoy doing outside of work, and bringing this inclusivity to the company environment. It was challenging considering how traditional the engineering and automotive industry had traditionally been. Now I am proud to look at what we built and how it has been adopted.