CHRO SA's executive manager Didi Sehume met with Shireen Maharaj of Pernod Ricard.
Shireen Maharaj, Pernod Ricard’s Human Resources Director for sub-Saharan Africa, changed her career path after studying psychology, choosing instead to become a flight attendant at SA express, when the airline was still a startup.
“I realised that clinical psychology was not for me but that had been the only plan that I had up to that point, so I had a bit of an identity crisis,” she said.
But, working in a start-up business, she was involved in many areas outside her know-how and eventually, and she became a part of the operations team and began to learn about South African labour legislation and labour dynamics in the aviation industry, which set her on her human resources career path.
She said the best advice she received, as a person changing careers, was to get a strong academic foundation, which was why she went back to university and got her honours in HR.
On why retention and attraction strategies are so difficult to get right, Shireen said that organisations are more complex and dynamic than they have ever been and they need their talent to be agile in responding to the changing external environment, which has bigger demands on the quality of talent that they are looking to attract. This shrinks the size of the talent pool of people who have such much-needed critical skills, and they have the power to dictate terms to employers because they know that they are wanted elsewhere.
People plan their careers around wanting to broaden their experience by working in different locations and environments. They are constantly looking for improve their skill set and are looking to employers to provide such an environment and to create these opportunities in very short periods of time, but there are not many companies that are able to offer career paths that meet all these demands.
She does feel that, while millennials bring much need energy and passion to the work environment, they tend to be unrealistic in their career ambitions because they expect to achieve success in record time.
“I interviewed a candidate who was 25 and had an MBA, and she said she wanted to become the managing director of the company within five years. Great to be ambitious, but when I asked how she planned to achieved this, she said ‘through hard work’. She had no real understanding of the role or what would be required to achieve that within that particular environment”
