Jo Stoner - Croydon High School 1978 - 1988

Employee Relations Director, Informatica Corporation.

Based in California

Who do I work for?

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), founded in 1993, is the leading provider of business analytics software that helps Global 2000 companies monitor and manage the performance of key business operations across the enterprise.  They have approximately 800 employees worldwide and I am responsible for all those employees based in the US, Canada, Latin America and Asia Pac.

What do I do?

My job title is Employee Relations Director. The role touches on all the people aspects of a company, including recruitment; ongoing development and retention of employees and ensuring any terminations of employment are handled according to legal and statutory procedures. My team and I are responsible for all employees in North America, Latin America, Canada and the Asia Pacific countries where we have operations.

How did I end up working in Human Resources?

My degree was in Industrial Economics at Nottingham University. I wanted to do a postgraduate course and chose to complete my IPD (Institute of Personnel and Development). The course was a mix of general management theory and specific personnel subjects, such as employee relations, industrial relations and employee development.  I was doing temporary work while studying part time and started working for a manufacturing company in the HR team.  This gave me a broad grounding in day-to-day HR practices and during my 3 years there, I learned about recruitment practices, restructuring of companies, termination procedures, pensions and compensation and benefits as well as the people related aspects of mergers and acquisitions.

I then worked for British Telecom for three years, who are a world class organisation in terms of their people practices. The company was going through a lot of change at this time and needed to become a more commercially focused organisation, which obviously had a lot of impact on the employees and the skills and knowledge that they had and that the company needed in order to deliver its business goals. After BT I went to a hi-tech start up and most recently, I have been working for Informatica firstly heading up their European HR team and now at their California offices.

What does the HR function do?

• I have worked as a generalist throughout my career. This means I can be involved in any aspect of the people cycle from
  recruiting new hires.
• setting up induction programmes.
• developing performance management programmes.
• design development plans and training programmes for people.
• identifying the high potential talent of the organisation and working on plans to retain their skills.
• researching and developing compensation and salary and benefit plans to attract and retain people.
• managing the people aspects of restructuring, downsizing programmes and acquisitions.
• and ensuring that terminations are handled in a compliant fashion, guiding line managers and employees through redundancy or dismissal processes

The day-to-day job is always varied and because you are working with people, it is almost impossible to predict what will happen, which is a challenge!  Some days are more tactical, dealing with operational day-to-day queries such as someone who has resigned, someone who has a grievance against a colleague or their manager or helping a manager recruit a new person to their team.

As you progress up the ladder, the role becomes more strategic. The HR team is a business partner to the organisation so as HR Director, you work with different parts of the business when they are planning for the year ahead, eg on investing in new countries, setting up new operations, developing leadership training programmes to ensure the organisation has the leaders for the future.  The key to success is to always maintain a commercial approach and design flexible solutions that meet the business requirements.  HR Strategy should always be aligned to the business strategy.

There are also people who specialise in a specific area of HR eg compensation and benefits, HR systems, immigration and internal assignments.

A Career in HR

I have always enjoyed the challenge and opportunities that my job has brought. I have worked for large organisation and hi-tech start ups, going through growth and downturns, both nationally and internationally. Until recently, I ran the European HR team for Informatica and 3 months ago, I was promoted to my current position and have moved to the west coast.  Living in California is certainly sunnier and I have had to learn about US legislation, which is very different from the European perspective.

You have to get on with people but you cannot be too much of a people person as it is never easy to dismiss somebody or to make a job redundant and that is the harder side of this career.  Many people in business don’t fully understand what HR can contribute and that can increase the challenge, establishing your credibility and proving the value you can add is a key first step to building relationships with the business.

If you are interested in working in HR, the first step is to get some experience, perhaps temping in an HR team. Helping out with administrative work and filing can give a good insight into what goes on.  A business degree will also help and studying for your IPD qualifications is critical.

It is a challenging job, especially if you work in the fast pace of the software industry.  It helps to be analytically minded and you have to be flexible in your approach, as you never quite know what is coming next.  But it is a very rewarding career and, as more businesses move to service related industries, where the only real asset is the employee, Human Resources is becoming a more critical function day by day.

As I am now based in California, work experience may prove a little difficult but I am happy to be contacted by email if anyone has any questions regarding what I have written or about a career in HR generally.