Navigating Through Organization Transformation with Georg Hirschi | S2 Ep 2

In our fifth episode of season 2, we speak with Georg Hirsch, Co-Founder of FOUND. Georg is a seasoned HR professional with global experience in recruitment, outplacement, career & leadership development. Georg shares his views about what it means to step out of our comfort zones during times of organizational transformation.

Georg was born in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Zurich. He worked in executive search before moving to Australia where he completed a Masters in HR Management and joined a start-up in the HR tech industry. 

In 2013, he joined LHH - Lee Hecht Harrisson, the global leader in outplacement, career & leadership development. Georg worked at LHH for 10 years in a variety of roles and in his last position as CEO Accelerated Growth Markets leading all countries across Europe and APAC. 

During COVID, Georg and his family made the decision to relocate to Europe. He then co-founded FOUND with his business partner Ranjit de Sousa with a vision to lead the digital “revolution” in hiring and guide top talent to careers that they really love. 

We were inspired to speak with Georg and learn how his international experience, his well-rounded background as an HR professional has helped him navigate through various business and career transitions.  

Learn more about Found .
https://www.getfound.io/

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Vanessa I: Today, we welcome to our show Georg Hirschi, co founder of a new company called Found. This is a community career based platform. We have known Georg in his capacity as LHH, Chief Executive Officer, Accelerated Growth Market. Georg has years of experience advising companies about organization transformation, which includes restructuring and workforce optimization.

[00:00:33] Vanessa T: Now this is oftentimes a very difficult topic to discuss, but we know that many of you may experience this at some point in your career. So the more you understand what it takes to be successful in this type of career transition, the more you will know how to journey through it if it happens to you. We hope you gain a lot from this episode and we hope you enjoy listening to it.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our new episode of Career Transitions. We're your hosts, Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo. Today, we are so excited and privileged to introduce our guest for today. His name is Georg Hirschi, the co founder and CEO of a new company called Found. 

[00:01:22] Vanessa I: Welcome, Georg. 

[00:01:23] Georg H: Hello, everyone. 

[00:01:24] Vanessa I: It's great to have you here with us today.

Let me take a little bit of time to introduce you to our audience. George, you were originally born in Switzerland and you graduated from the University of Zurich with a Master of Arts in Applied Science, Commerce and Business Administration. Your major was in Human Resources at a time when it was not that popular.

And I've noticed that Human Resources became indeed the red thread of your career. You started working in largest private executive search firm in Zurich and learned talent acquisition from the ground up. Then you moved to Australia and you went back to school. You graduated with a Master of Strategic Human Resources Management from the University of Wollongong.

After your graduation, you continued your career in a startup that developed HR tech and a range of HR services across a pack. 

[00:02:20] Vanessa T: After a successful sale of the venture in 2013, you joined LHH, Lee Hecht Harrison. Now, LHH is a firm that's very well known to many HR professionals. And it specializes in outplacement, career, and leadership development.

Georg, you worked for LHH for over 10 years, and your last position at LHH was chief executive officer of accelerated growth markets, leading all countries across Europe. and Asia Pacific. 

[00:02:51] Vanessa I: During the COVID, you made the decision to come back to Europe. And after you settled down in Zurich, you co founded a company called Found with a vision to lead the digital revolution in hiring and guide top talent to careers that they really love.

Georg, welcome to our show. 

[00:03:08] Vanessa T: Welcome George. 

[00:03:09] Georg H: Thanks so much for having me. 

[00:03:10] Vanessa T: Georg, you've had some very impressive career moves, moving between Europe to Australia and now back to Europe. You've moved up the leadership positions. You've taken now an entrepreneurial role as well, and all of these with increasing levels of complexity.

As you think back through your different transitions in career, which would you consider as the most significant in your journey so far? 

[00:03:34] Georg H: Yeah. Thanks, Vanessa. I think every career move comes at a different time in life with a different level of experience in your backpack. So it's really hard to compare the difficulty or the significance of each move.

However, as I reflected on the question, there's really two moves that stand out. The first one was to settle with my, at that time, girlfriend, now wife, in a new country for us in Australia back in 2006 and start studying, start a new life, start to get to know new people. And while studying and loving our lives in Australia.

I thought I need to get into a job here and really get to know the local environment. And so I found a role in the startup at minimum wage and really just trying to get a foot in the door. That was of course hard at the beginning, but was really worth its while and a great learning journey. The other one that stands out is of course, co founding our venture sound with my partner, Ranjit D'Souza, who by the way, was the global CEO of LHH in the past, and so we met at Lee Hecht Harrison over the last 10 years.

Starting a business is the most challenging task in anyone's career, in my point of view, because you really live off your own resources. And at the moment, I feel I need every little bit of what I've learned in the past in order to achieve great things with Found. 

[00:04:58] Vanessa I: Thank you for sharing and thank you for being so candid and transparent about this.

One of the things I was wondering is about the comfort zone. Each of these transitions challenged you to step out of your comfort zone. I was wondering what prompted you to want to try new challenges and what was the trigger behind all these challenges, Georg? 

[00:05:20] Georg H: Yeah, for me, I think the main trigger is deep within me, really wanting to create impact.

And while creating that impact has a steep personal learning curve. Now where does that come from? I think this is driven by an innate passion for that topic, people at work. As you said, Vanessa, 20 years ago, a major in human resources wasn't that popular. But I was always really curious about how to improve people engagement and productivity.

I'm obviously super lucky to have a great wife and kids who also share the curious nature, because I don't think you can really be passionate and be driven by having impact and learning without an environment that is supporting that. And so, um, I feel I'm very lucky in that sense. 

[00:06:09] Vanessa T: It's really interesting to hear how you've stepped out of your comfort zone because in all of the work that you've done in talent and in the work technology space, you've really supported many people in career transitions.

I want to understand what have you learned in terms of career transitions about yourself that you've now been able to use to help others as you coach other people on their journey? 

[00:06:33] Georg H: Yeah, thanks, Vanessa. I think I have three points here. In terms of what I learned in transitioning from one career to the next. 

The first one is mindset drives behaviors. What I mean with that is that in any phase of transition, one needs to really reflect and understand what's your own personal mindset in order to plan that next step. In a phase of transition, it's important that we adopt a mindset that is driven by that curiosity and learning, because otherwise we won't be able to sort of get into something new.

Secondly, surrounding yourself with a network of people. That allows you to bounce off ideas, get feedback, but also be open to really get challenged, I think is really important. I mean, here you might be talking about a formal coach that you could have in your team or a mentor, but also business contacts, friends, colleagues, sometimes even parents can help here to give you guidance and then finally in a phase of transition, I think you really need to try and define a landing strip on where you want to be heading to.

This should be derived by thinking about what's important, not just in that next step, but beyond that next step. In the step after that, and that will give you directional guidance in terms of what needs to be done right now. Now, having said all this with the landing strip, it's still might end up being different, but I think it's important to have a true north when you're in a transition phase.

[00:08:08] Vanessa I: Where in talent acquisition, did you use some of your own experience of moving to Australia, for instance, to explain to your candidates how, what it takes to move abroad, or did you use some of the transition you made from, you know, working from an industry to another, to also coach them into what it takes to go to the next job, is it something that you were using regularly in your interaction with your candidates? 

[00:08:35] Georg H: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely try to share my experience with others. Just a very topical story. We are hiring an intern at the moment at Found. And so I'm having great conversations with a lot of high potential young people who are getting into their first job and also talking to a lot of international people.

And I think sharing with them, What they should be looking for after university in their first job, that it's not the money that's most important, but the learning and the people that they surround themselves also that they get into a field or a product that they're really passionate about. 

Definitely things that, that I try and share without taking me as an example too much, because obviously the learning journey is different for everyone. And I think that should be respected. 

[00:09:20] Vanessa T: I love when you talked about the, the three points about how you help coach others on their journey. You mentioned this point, quite a few of our previous guests also talked about.

The mindset driven by curiosity and learning. I'm very fascinated with how this piece about being curious and being open to new experiences really impacts how people take on these new and adventurous experiences. Talk to us a little bit about this piece on curiosity and how did that emerge for you? 

[00:09:53] Georg H: I know it's a bit of a term in mode at the moment, this curiosity topic.

And I think it sounds nice and intriguing, but it's actually really difficult to do because anything new also brings a lot of risk. And it's easy to say we should be open to take risks and we should be curious about new things. It also means that you're letting go of the old and you're letting go of also maybe something that was stable or something that you really understood.

And that's hard. It's actually tough. And learning is also difficult because it gets you out of that, as you said, out of that comfort zone. And you may feel a little helpless at times if you're in an environment that you suddenly have a feeling that you're out of your depth. And so how do you do this? I think it is really important that one is aware of the situation, of the surroundings.

As I said before, that it's in the right environment, in a trusted environment, where you are allowed to learn, where you're allowed to ask questions. Where you're also allowed to make mistakes. And unfortunately, that's often not the case, especially in organizations that try to mitigate risk, you're actually not allowed to make mistakes and have a learning journey.

So yes, it sounds sexy and interesting, this curiosity topic, but it's hard to do in practical terms. 

[00:11:13] Vanessa T: Great. Thanks for sharing. 

[00:11:15] Vanessa I: Yeah. Thank you for sharing because I think this is a topic that is actually very much linked to our next question to you. And one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on the podcast, Georg, is your experience about outplacement.

So we want first and foremost to explain to our audience outplacement. Outplacement is a very familiar for HR professional, but for other people, maybe not. This is the term we use to actually explain the series of action that a company can take to help an employee who is made redundant to find a new job after termination.

And usually companies use consulting companies like LHH to support them because LHH is highly specialized in this field and they have a lot of research and a lot of experience. And then this is how we came to know you. So We wanted to ask you about that piece because we know that this is very important also in career transition.

There are many career transition that I would say, you know, done because people are so excited about new opportunities. They want to discover something new. They want to learn something new, but there are some situations which are happening, what I call by default. You are actually forced to do a career transition because your job doesn't exist anymore.

And you impressed me a lot in a couple of conversation you made on this topic. And that's the reason why we wanted to invite you. So I wanted to hear your thoughts after 10 years working for LHH on outplacement and what it means for you and what it means to do it right. Because I think that when companies have no choice but to do that, what are the learnings that you got that allow them to do a good job or to try to minimize the impact to the employee?

Thank you for sharing your experience, Georg. 

[00:13:02] Georg H: Yeah, thank you. It was quite a topical to talk about our placement right now, as many organizations have a need to think about their future state and how they can be successful in an increasingly difficult commercial environment. So first up, it's important to understand that there are two parties to such restructuring or a placement that is important to consider as they have two different objectives and situation.

The first party is of course the organization. And then the second party is the impacted individual. And as you said, in an outplacement context, the impacted individual is forced to take a step outside of the existing work and job agreement and looks for something else. Now, both parties in that situation have a set of different objectives and therefore need different support to have a successful outcome.

Let's talk about the organization first. Any business that is going through a restructuring project needs to be aware. They need to undertake two journeys at the same time. The first journey is what I call the pain, which is the turnaround. And the second journey is of course, the gain, which is this process of working on the future state.

Because as an organization, you cannot approach a restructuring project without thinking about how to be successful post this pain process. So the gain includes the delivery of a more simplified organization that's focused on future growth, because that's ultimately where the organization wants to get to.

However, the pain that's needed to get there is focused on things like performance improvement, efficiency, and of course, cost reduction, which are all involving very tough decisions. Now, in my experience, the major reason leading to poor restructuring outcomes, and let's not forget about 80 percent of restructuring projects are not successful.

So the reason for that lies in organizations don't take a rigorous approach to planning and then integrating the pain and the gain initiatives required at an organizational level to really align people in a coherent way that's leading to that lasting and sustainable change. The next thing I would say at an organizational level is that businesses should really honor their organizational values when times get tough.

When the chips are down, that's when every executive, every business leader, line manager should go back to the values board that they have and try and think about how they want to communicate the changes to their people that is aligned with what they agreed they want to stand for. This is really important for the workforce and also those people who are remaining in the business, because in a restructuring project, not everyone will need to be leaving, right?

There's, there's some that are impacted because those people. Who the company wants to retain, they do remember how the company acts in a difficult time. And the organizational culture will actually be defined by that. It's not some high level communication that will define corporate culture. It's how these people see leaders acting when it gets difficult.

It's also important that the organization obviously takes a broader view than just supporting the impact of individuals who are losing their jobs, which we're going to talk about in a second. So leaders need to be skilled at leading that change. And of course, the employees that remain in the business, they need to be supported and to stay engaged with the business and its vision.

Talking a little bit about the individuals impacted by losing their jobs, they really need a program and a support structure that helps them, first of all, with dealing with this new situation, because quite often this comes at a total shock. They might not even see it coming. So that emotional state needs to be supported.

And then these individuals, they need to be given clear guidance, tools to start to think about how they can plan for their future careers. And that's a complex task. 

[00:17:21] Vanessa T: Georg, can you share a little bit about this piece about equipping leaders? Now you talked just now about how organizations have got to also help leaders to be skilled at change management.

And can you touch a little bit about that and how you go about helping leaders to get skilled at doing that? 

[00:17:40] Georg H: What I've seen a lot of organizations do in these restructuring and transformation projects is that they just take a view that the leaders will be able and have an innate talent to then communicate and lead their teams through these transformational times.

And that's just not the case. And so any executive team that's forced into such a transformation project really needs to think about what are the support structures that these leaders need in terms of actually dealing with the change themselves to start with. Then thinking about how to communicate the changes to their teams, for them to think about the nuances in terms of communication and support to the different stakeholder groups, right?

People who stay. People who might be impacted, also external stakeholders, customers, et cetera. And obviously then there is a whole series of leadership development programs that can help with communications, with leading people. With also understanding where in this journey that the leader is themselves, because they might lose interest in the business, right, and therefore need guidance.

And that often gets underestimated because the organization should think, okay, that they're here, they're in a leadership role, so they're expected to do, but it's not that simple. 

[00:19:00] Vanessa T: Yeah, I think it is about not overestimating what leaders know, but really to, to bring everyone to that level playing field, no matter what level the leader may be at in the organization, all leaders I think need to be prepared for how they deal with the change, including support for employees, support for their teams, and then how they as leaders will continue interacting post messaging.

I think those are oftentimes things that we may not pay as much attention to because we might be very focused on all the technicalities of the actual redundancy.

[00:19:36] Georg H: Yes, but the mind goes very quickly to, I guess, more the head guided actions. So let's tell the individual that they're impacted. Versus the more emotionally difficult processes of thinking, what does this person need?

What's that person need? What does the leader need? And actually making it a bit more, um, inclusive, which obviously includes more complexity. 

[00:20:00] Vanessa I: In the interventions that you had, Georg, when you shared about your experience, I was very impressed with your ability to influence the companies you were advising, because you are very, very strong at that.

You have this ability to actually move the needle. How did you manage to do that? Because ultimately, I mean, when you were working for LHH, you were hired as a team to support, but at the same time, you were very, very good at giving feedback, at guiding also the organization into the right direction. Now how did you do that?

What did you create from an influence skill perspective to, to make it happen? 

[00:20:34] Georg H: Well, first, thanks very much for the positive feedback. When I'm in that fortunate position to be able to share my opinion and my experiences, I do think it's very important that it comes from a point of view that is genuine and also reflects the best practices that my background or background of LHH can bring to such situations.

And I do think organizations at that point in time, they need to be challenged in terms of what their thinking is as they approach a restructuring project. Now, some organizations and some individuals, and there the compliment goes back to you. They're open to be challenged and curious, you know, going back to the very beginning of the conversation, curious to learn about how to approach it.

Obviously others are less so, and they just want a firm like LHH to execute what they thought about. But I take that genuine and best practice point of view and try to share this with organizations to ultimately give them a better chance at succeeding in those projects. And that also involves turning over some of their decisions they may have already made.

And sort of going back to the drawing board in some aspects and rethinking of how to plan for these restructuring projects. 

[00:21:53] Vanessa T: Very good. Georg, let's flip it on the other side in terms of your role with employees. How do you move someone, an employee, who's been forced into this transition, let's just say the redundancy, how do you get them into a more positive mindset so that they can then move forward?

[00:22:11] Georg H: Yeah, so that's obviously a difficult task because most of those individuals are reacting with some disbelief or even shock to the news. They need an environment who first of all, just really listens and provides some practical guidance as to what the next step could look like. There's really well thought sort of first step programs in place that deal with that shock of hearing the news. And that often needs to be happening immediate, really after that conversation with the line manager or within internal HR that the job is impacted, that support should then start right then, right after that conversation. So that's sort of first reaction handling, I guess.

Post being able to soften that shock, there needs to be, um, a program in place that is supported by true coaching and a variety of tools. Obviously these days there's a lot of online tools that support the change in career development, which is really the foundation in terms of moving to that more positive mindset.

Now, that mindset about thinking about the future will then be developed over time. That doesn't come in the first week, not in the second week, but also every individual is quite different, right? People can react cynically. Some people can immediately see a chance in a change, but definitely that future landing strip that we mentioned at the beginning, that needs to be painted together with those individuals so that they see that any change in life.

As hard as it may be, also provides an opportunity for the future. And that's where individuals need to get to when they want to develop a new positive mindset. 

[00:23:49] Vanessa T: And that hurdle is probably one of the hardest to get over. 

[00:23:52] Georg H: Oh, absolutely. That is tough. And I still believe that the human support is an essential part to do that successfully.

And with that, I mean, coaching and mentorship rather than just sending someone to an online tool library where they can read up on what to do next. Our DNA as humans, I guess, thankfully is just not there yet to then sort of move into that future territory. 

[00:24:16] Vanessa I: Thank you for this advice and for all the sharing you're having, Georg, because I think for a lot of our audience that this is really, really useful.

And there might be some people who are listening to us who are going through that now. So, you know, having the perspective of someone who is so experienced as you can be, can be really, really good for them. We are coming now to the third part of the podcast, where we want to talk to you about another part of the career transition, which is to move to entrepreneurial spirit and to entrepreneurship.

And one of the things you share with me when you told me you were moving and leaving Sydney was about starting your company. And I was very excited about that. And we wanted to understand a little bit more about this part of your career, which is a, a new chapter and maybe first you can tell us briefly about Found, the company you have created with your partner.

And then we will move on into the skills and, and all the transition that it means for you personally. 

[00:25:13] Georg H: Yeah, super cool. Thank you for the opportunity. So at Found our vision is to lead the digital consumer revolution that's happening around us. And bring that into the careers game to help people find careers that they really love.

What we've seen over the last few years especially is that unfortunately a lot of people are unhappy at work. An increasing amount feels like they're not in the right job. But they feel a bit helpless about changing that because applying to jobs, working on your CV, networking, and God forbid, going to a recruiter is really tough, especially when you're in a job, you just don't have the time.

So these people stay in their jobs. To a certain extent, miserable, which is obviously not good for them, but it's not good for the organization either because they've got a disengaged and unproductive workforce. And then on the other side, what we've seen is that you've got a lot of employers saying we cannot find the right talent if we find them, we can't find them at speed, and even if that's happening, we don't know how to select them.

And so it's a classic environment where supply is not meeting demand. And that's what we are trying to solve with Found. So we are building a community based career platform where we match the very best talent with in demand skills to growth focused employers. However, this is done in a way where the employer pitch their opportunities to talent via short video post them being matched based on their data set.

And so talent doesn't need to apply to jobs no longer.

[00:26:49] Vanessa I: Oh, that's, that's really interesting. And tell us about your own journey in this process, Georg, because for me, you're a person I know, uh, extremely sophisticated and agile in the corporate world, incredible business partner, strong consultant. And I can list all the skills that you have demonstrated in your previous corporate life, but now it's, it's a new game and you need to demonstrate some new skills.

So can you tell us a little bit more about this transition? 

[00:27:18] Georg H: Yes, of course. I would say I was always an entrepreneur at heart. Those mindsets that we talked about at the beginning, curiosity, learning, passion, energy. I mean, these are all things that an entrepreneur needs to have. However, the application in a true startup is obviously different when you're working in a corporate setting.

For me, entrepreneurship is, I guess, the champions league, if you wanna compare it with football to everything else. It's just so different and challenging versus being. Being a CEO in a larger business, because you need to rely on your own resources. Uh, you need to rely on a very close knit team. And you need to start something that doesn't exist as a co founder.

That means that in some parts of the day, you're focused on very transactional tasks, just helping to get traction, helping getting things done. At the next minute, you find yourself in the most complex or strategic side of things in the business, developing a roadmap or solving for technical aspects, et cetera.

And so you need to have this ability to move from super transactional to very complex within seconds. However, one thing and one skill I think remains as an entrepreneur or as a business leader in a company. If you have that ability to create a great team around you, the chances for success are just way higher.

And that's definitely a skill that I believe I've been able to take over from my corporate roles to the startup world. 

[00:28:49] Vanessa I: Through Found, you decided to create a new concept about finding talent. I assume, and I know that you have done a lot of research about the way people are looking for jobs today. What are the trends that you can share with us that could be interesting for our audience?

[00:29:04] Georg H: Yeah, I mean, if we think about the previous topic of placement. And what's happening in the, uh, placement world, obviously that's been very much coaching led in the past. I believe that coaching element is still going to be very, very important, but like any other service, the digital transformation is challenging this approach as well, where there's new technologies with more region scale that can provide individuals who are forced into such career transition with a more effective and faster support.

What I've seen over the last few years is that there's obviously career transition firms among also LSH who may not have invested in those technologies early enough and find themselves a little bit on the back foot now to really efficiently support individuals the world over with the right support structure.

However, the good news is that that human element, I think, is still the center and then needs to remain so. 

[00:30:04] Vanessa T: That's fantastic, Georg. Final question for you. With so many years of rich experience as a leader, what do you hope to bring to the community in the next phase of your career? 

[00:30:15] Georg H: Well, that's a, that's a big question.

As I said, the vision at Found really is to guide people to careers that they really love. And from everything I know, if you're in a job that you love, that also means you're quite happy in life. And if you're happy in life, then you've succeeded. So our vision we found is to disrupt an industry globally in this hiring market that has barely changed in 200 years and really enable people to get into the right careers and with that enabling organizations to find the talent that they've not been able to.

[00:30:49] Vanessa I: Excellent. Thank you so much, Georg, for joining us today on the podcast. I think it was a great session and we covered a lot of ground together from your, uh, own career transition, your experience in our placement, and now your experience as an entrepreneur. We're very grateful for your time. And, uh, we wish you all the best with your company, Found.

All the best to you and all the best to your team. We look forward to hearing good news from you. And we thank everyone for listening to the podcast today. 

[00:31:19] Georg H: Well, thanks so much for having me. 

[00:31:20] Vanessa I: Thank you, Georg.