Meet Glenn Donaldson, intelliHR's Head of Customer Success who is passionate about technology, psychology and always putting the customer first.
A: I predominantly worked in retail around six years all up, right out of high school and I did that while I was at uni. I did a Bachelor of Psychology, which was great, I loved it. I spoke to a counsellor at the uni to talk about what I could do with this, and he suggested doing a Masters in Human Resource Management and a big focus of that was on data. So, I completed that, and it was around that time, I joined APRG doing recruitment and talent assessment, such as behavioural assessments, group interviews and all that type of thing. Then I overheard Rob [Bromage, CEO of intelliHR] talk about intelliHR and thought to myself "Yeah, I want to be a part of that!" So, I joined when we had no customers, I was just creating processes as we needed it. And now I'm growing the team and have landed into this role!
Q: Which leads us right into our next question, tell us about your role as Head of Customer Success?
A: I guess Head of Customer Success is being an advocate in the business for our customers. 'All about the customer' is one of our five core values and it's one that I particularly champion. I find if you have that value up front with product development, with support centres and how we deliver implementations and process designs, then I know, I can trust, that we'll always be delivering to what the customer is needing and wanting. The role itself is quite big, I'm across a lot of different channels. That includes account management and overseeing implementations. There's also product development, I'm Head of Customer Success, but I'm also in the product team, which is the creation of what intelliHR is. And so, I'm involved in design thinking and solution design for particular features in the product. As I work with literally every customer and my job is to understand the industry as much as possible, I can help the team and also help the product develop in a way that encompasses all those industries. So, that's my value in sitting in the product team as it helps with that bridging.
A: Probably the space we're operating in and moving towards. I love the artificial intelligence realm that's starting to come to fruition and I love the possibilities that businesses are starting to create and open with technology like we're doing. Measuring people's engagement, happiness and looking at Natural Language Processing and things like that. It's not something that businesses have typically done, because my background is psychology and I'm very passionate about psychology and human behaviour and relationships, particularly neuroscience, I'm finding the technology starting to be introduced into businesses is opening up that. It's creating more of an awareness or opportunities for that to start coming into people processes and HR practice and just general leaders.
Q: What have been some achievements or highlights in your role?
A: Creating the Customer Success area of the business has been a big achievement for me. We're a fully operational part of the business that supports all of our customers and also bridges development into the customer realm. Along with marketing and sales, we do a lot of work in trying to get everyone aligned, so I'm definitely proud of being able to be a part of or help create that type of area. We're a really cool team, we all have different skills and abilities. It's been really cool to see how all of us interact and do different ways of things, but we're all really efficient, we're all really effective. We're all learning off each other as well.
A: I think what excites me is being part of the growth. I've never been in a situation before where I've started with the business at the bottom and seeing it grow, listing on the ASX and we are looking to go international and so I think being a part of that is exciting in itself. I get excited by what the developers are doing, a lot of what they're pouring into the platform around possibilities around machine learning and possibilities around more AI and things like that, it's really cool to think that we, as a company, are building something like that. Something that people actually want and are able to use effectively. That is pretty cool.
Q: What do you enjoy about working at intelliHR?
A: I enjoy the culture. I enjoy the opportunity to innovate and create, I think that's something that's unique to this business, not a lot of businesses allow you at any area of the business that you sit to innovate and create. We (at intelliHR) definitely have the opportunity to do it. Aside from that, I love the opportunity to talk to people and interact, so that's why it's the perfect job for me because I get to do that on an extremity in the business and externally.