Hiring Has Changed: What HR Leaders Need to Know | with Maria Prishlyak, MiFinity

0:08Welcome everyone to this episode of the Talent Fix. I'm delighted to be joined by Maria Prishlyak, head of HR for Mfinity, a fintech company based out of Belfast with offices in Malta and Dublin. Maria has worked for companies like Amazon, Pennsylvania State University, and for the past three years with Myfinity. So welcome, Maria, to this episode of The Talent Fix. Delighted you can join us. Before we dive into our questions for the episode, would you like to give us a quick intro?

0:49Maria Prishlyak: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Yeah. So as you mentioned, Penn State, I was actually on the tennis team there. So that was a great experience to have. Surprisingly, it's very relevant to working on teams. And then my first HR career was starting out of Amazon, where I was in fulfillment centers. So HR there works 24-7, and it's a full-on operation. I supported buildings from 800 to 5 ,000 employees. And then from there, I transitioned to Maxim Integrated, which is a microchip company, completely different from what Amazon did. And then now at Myfinity, which is a fintech, the industries are different, but what HR does, there's crossover and you learn and you take from experience and you build on it.

1:43Of course. So, you know, HR is the same really no matter what industry you're in. But can you give us a quick kind of just a quick intro to what Myfinity does? Absolutely.

1:56Maria Prishlyak: So we're a global fintech. We provide secure and compliant quick payment solutions. So we operate using two licenses, MFSA license for out of Malta, and then the FCA license out of the UK. We have over 25 different nationalities at this point employed with us. Yeah, huge. We grew 47 % since when I started. So I was the first HR hire before that the CEO used to do HR work. I'm sure you love that. So, yeah, it's actually really, really nice. You get to build it from scratch and you get to lay the foundation, which has been really rewarding. Sure. OK, brilliant. So let's jump into the questions, Maria.

2:43So, you know, talking about kind of cutting agency reliance, tell us a bit about how you grew direct hires and referrals by over 20 percent and what changed first for you?

2:57Maria Prishlyak: So what we've done as a team, we saw the cost. We used to spend around 36K on agencies per quarter. And then this year right now we're tracking at about 50 or under K for the full year. So there's a huge improvement there. The whole thing started with us making a decision to try to recruit in-house. We have Jenny Kerwin. She's now nominated for HR Rising Stars. She took over recruitment and she's learned from the agencies. The agencies that we work with, we have a really good partnership with them. So they actually took the time to teach her recruitment. so we're able it's really really nice out of them to do that um so they've been teaching her she's been working with the managers so they put themselves they put themselves out of a job no because like we still work with them on the very technical difficult to fill roles um but a lot of the roles that we previously had to go to an agency we couldn't fill ourselves we're now able to fill.

3:57Maria Prishlyak: Jenny's filling them perfectly. Sure. Okay. And we promote all the roles internally as well. So that has been a huge plus. We've increased the employer brand awareness. We actually created it. There wasn't one before. So we created my Finity live page. We introduced things like meet the executives to show the human side of the company and not just the FinTech portion of it. Yeah. Started focusing on CSR initiatives, family day initiatives. to really grow the connections with the staff's families and then the community. That's brilliant. Okay, fantastic. And in terms of, can you talk to us a bit about kind of what role AI is playing in your recruitment processes at the moment?

4:43Are you replacing any tasks done by recruiters with agents or what are your thoughts around that? So we're actually using AI a little bit differently.

4:54Maria Prishlyak: we're not using it to screen resumes or CVs. We're not using it for interviews. What we're trying to do is understand where people use AI either for their applications or during the interviews. And that has been our partnership back to the agencies. They're helping us learn recruitment. We're helping them identify AI usage. So most of the focus on AI is because some of the CVs, they come in great, but they lack the actual hands-on experience. And you don't need to know everything during an interview. That's not the ask. But the ask is for people to be honest. A lot of the hires that we do are based on your aptitude and your attitude.

5:39Maria Prishlyak: It's not so much that you need to know every single skill set that there is. We're happy to teach. So in terms of AI, we're mostly teaching our managers on how to screen candidates that are using AI during the interview oh okay that's really interesting so you're noticing candidates kind of trying to game the system using ai and get a leg up with interview answers during interviews and obviously using ai to write their cvs and things like that right yeah okay um but in terms of yeah um your own usage of it um it's not something that you've kind of deployed within the recruitment process yet or do you plan to?

6:21Maria Prishlyak: At the moment, we don't plan to. I think it's very important to screen the CVs so that every candidate gets a fair chance to be reviewed. So we review every single CV individually. I think that's something that can be missed dramatically by somebody if you're purely implementing AI. Sure, sure. But I mean, I know this is an extreme example, but I met one government client um in the middle east and when they post some jobs they get 25 000 applications so get loads you know that could take that could take a human recruiter some time to get through it yeah yeah we work with the management team so like we have essentially a hiring team for each role um and then we screen the cvs and then during the interviews the thing with the CV is like sometimes they don't match like it's very easy to draft a perfect CV it mostly comes out in the interview but we're huge and encouraging people to not use AI for for the interview portion.

7:24Okay okay very good so what's the biggest challenge you face when it comes to hiring?

7:31Maria Prishlyak: It depends which role to be honest with you on the technical role I would say the biggest challenge right now is the EAI usage, which is becoming very prominent among candidates. And it's really just finding folks that maybe you don't know every single task, but you're willing to learn and you're being open about it. That really puts you forward. Okay. Okay. And in terms of then, how do you test for that attitude and aptitude? How do you know if a candidate has that right attitude you're looking for? so one thing that our ceo is very big on it's seeing that it doesn't have to have a perfect the candidate doesn't have to have a perfect cv it's as long as they've had any sort of jobs you can see the progression it could be them going like we've hired brilliant folks from the food and hospitality industry that have progressed with the company that come outside of the fintech backgrounds completely okay and then they're really growing in the company so it's really having the right attitude and it's having that self-respect um to try the different jobs yeah so you want to see you want to see candidates progress in whatever career that they've had right yeah yeah yeah very good and what typically what roles have you filled with candidates from hospitality what kind of roles uh client services a lot okay a lot of client services and then they're progressing.

9:02Maria Prishlyak: One thing that Myfinity does that I think really stands out as well is we pay for education, be it courses, be it certificates, being full-on college degrees. So we really help folks choose a career path for themselves and then enable them to go through it. So even if you come with no FinTech background, even if you don't come with a business background into certain roles, you can build your career with us. Sure, that's fantastic. Okay. So, okay. And then in terms of the EU pay transparency directive, kind of where are you at with that? That's kind of a hot topic now for HR managers. What should they be doing right now?

9:46Maria Prishlyak: So depending on which location they're at, right, obviously each location in the EU, well, it is an EU directive. It has country specifics. So we prepared ourselves for the individual countries where we are. and it's a different process for each. And then training the managers because it's not so much that you need to worry about the policy that you're creating. Yes, obviously you need to have your basics covered. You need to have the policies. You need to do the grading. You need to review the pay and the pay charts. But you need to teach the managers that if somebody comes with a question, how do you address it?

10:24Maria Prishlyak: When do you address it? Because some countries also, for example, or like Malta, it's time bound from when a question comes in or a request comes in from an employee for when an official answer needs to come out. So a lot of it is HR should be working with the managers to make sure that they're equipped for success. Perfect. Good advice. OK. Right. And in terms of kind of advice for HR leaders today, from specifically maybe a HR leader that has to grow a team that is hiring maybe three to seven people at a time, what advice would you have for them? What's the best way to go about that from your experience?

11:07Maria Prishlyak: I would say laying down the foundation, the basics. so having clear processes that are repeatable having these processes written out because once the quick hiring starts it's easy to have misses and then inconsistent experiences for candidates and then word can spread like fire so I would cover the basics and make sure that those are bulletproof before implementing new initiatives that's great advice okay so doing the basics and getting them written down and preparing in advance of any kind of hiring sprints. I think that's really good advice. So before we finish, Maria, is there anything else you'd like to add or anything else that HR managers desperately need to know when they get back to their desk after listening to this?

11:56Maria Prishlyak: I think one thing that would be very helpful for organizations that are growing is to implement role request forms so that HR works with the hiring managers to define the targets that the new hire will be set for the following year, the ROI, so the return on investment on the role, what's going to be delivered, the interview panel. So who's going to be doing the interviews to make sure that it's consistent and then how many stages it is and also the expectations for the hire. That way, when HR is communicating with the hire, when they're posting the role it could be. They're giving more information than just the job spec.

12:34Maria Prishlyak: It's actually going into what's going to be the job looking like, what are the expectations. And then when the candidate starts with the company, they feel that there was full transparency and they're prepared. I like it. So the hiring manager knows what to expect and also the candidate coming into the role knows what to expect. That makes total sense. So that's a great way to finish, Maria. great tip and thanks again for joining us and thanks for listening and please like and subscribe The Talent Fix where you get your podcasts thanks thank you very much Barry