CEO Insights Magazine

HR managers have a wide range of responsibilities and constantly shifting priorities. Being the face of an organization, HR manager is responsible for recruitment, onboarding, career development, performance reviews, compensation and benefits and employee relations, among other tasks. A true HR manager is the one who embraces the latest technology and helps drive business efficiencies. Junaid Husnain, Global HR manager at Alsvior Global, is one such industry expert who is doing exceptionally well to help his company achieve new heights. In a recent interview with CEO Insights Asia, Junaid shares his experience and thoughts of working in HR and talent acquisition space for a decade, current trends and the future. Let’s hear from him.

Could you give a brief description about your professional background experiences?

I’m in the human resources and recruitment space for a decade now. I started my career from Nokia, and then I moved to Abu Dhabi. After some time, I worked for one of the biggest conglomerate in Abu Dhabi. And then I moved to one of the most exciting tech startup back then, Fetcher. I worked for them a couple of years, I shifted to an American multinational company, IQVIA. It is the second largest data science company in the world. And then I decided to move to Spain to pursue double masters in human resource management. I hold numerous HR certifications from a CHRM, PHRM, MBA-CSM to double masters in HR. Today, I’m associated with Alsvior Global, a digital consulting firm.

How do you keep HR in Sync with Strategic Workforce Planning?

It is impossible to work toward business goals, if all departments in your organisation are not in sync. This holds true when it comes to coordinating HR with long-term workforce planning. Although the workforce planning process ought to be continuous, this isn't always the case, making it even more crucial that HR be in line with the workforce planning model your company employs.

Having your HR staff work together to create the plan and assist in its distribution to other departments is the first crucial step in ensuring that they are on the same page as your strategic workforce planning model. The HR staff won't be caught off guard or overburdened by any goals or targets they have to fulfil if they are involved in the plan's creation from the outset. It is important to monitor and review actual performance of your employees within each department. This will allow you to understand where headcount or spending  may be off track and allow you to revise the plan to help departments better achieve their goals. You must undertake resource planning and have a suitable resource plan, a suitable hiring plan, a suitable operations strategy, and a suitable change management. You must implement new procedures and fresh innovative business plans. Because, when you're working for a startup organization, it is not as easy as it looks to hire or attract talent.

As the Global HR manager, what are the skills that you look for in fresh candidates?

The most important thing for me in a candidate is self-motivation. Self-motivation is about liking what you do enough to want to do a good job regardless of the external reward. Team work is another thing I would want in a candidate. Most jobs require a degree of collaboration with other people – and sometimes managing others, as well. Even work that’s often seen as lonely, such as accounting or software development, may involve considerable input from other people. So a candidate should have the ability to gel and collaborate with the team. The other aspect is willingness, and ultimately, an ability to learn are very important qualities of a good employee – not just for learning new hard skills, but also for growing as a professional and as a person. The concept of adaptability is also one  of the qualities of a good employee and candidate associated with willingness to learn. Along with the knowledge about the work, you should have basic communication skill. Being skilled in communication doesn’t mean you have to be great with words or even really sophisticated and eloquent. You need to be able to clearly get your message across, in verbal or written speech, and be able to grasp other people’s meaning.

What is that one aspect that motivates you to work hard and drives you forward?

I never switched my career from HR to another field. So, I would say like HR talent acquisition is one of my cores. If you are connected to your area of interest, it motivates you rather than if you are forced to do something you do not particularly enjoy doing, you may not feel motivated. Another aspect that encourages me is to find innovative ways to solve a problem or helping the team solve an issue is my creative outlet. I love thinking up fresh solutions or designs. I also like to be challenged to help make them more effective or providing inspiration to pivot to a new idea.

Junaid Husnain, Global HR Manager, Alsvior Global

Junaid Husnain is an international diversified high potential HR & Talent management professional/Expert HR Entrepreneur. He has worked in successful tech startups in the Middle East, consulting HR professional for European-based startups. He completed double Masters's in HRM with a Minor in Project Management and E-commerce from EAE Business School, Madrid, Spain.