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Life is short and we are simply passing through here. We cannot stay. Therefore, it is essential that we find guides we can trust and who can help us discover and fulfill our highest purposes in life before it's too late.
This phrase is from John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and it makes me reflect on the things that are important at the end of life, as our talent hacker recounts.
Sacrificing happiness, the people you love, the things that are important to you as a person - you shouldn't do it to seek things in a job, in a company, in environments that have nothing to do with your personal matters. Because at the end of the day, when we're 80, 90 years old, you'll never, ever regret what you didn't do at work, the meeting you didn't attend, the paper you didn't write in college, the person you didn't hire, not having spent more time at work. But you will regret not having spent more time with your children, not having been kinder to your wife, not having been more generous with your health, not having been more generous in pursuing your biggest dreams to travel, to do a sport.
I think that's the best advice I can give because I've heard it a lot when I do interviews, when I interview candidates. Time passes very quickly and the main focus should be on you as a person, right?
A challenge that goes beyond how to increase blended or virtual corporate training, which is what we do. And we asked ourselves rather how to increase the humanization of companies in a systemic and accelerated way. Well, looking for answers, we found some key actors.
Those who can be the hinge of change, the Human Talent people. However, to solve that question, we need these actors to have, if not more, at least the same impact, influence and action as the leaders of marketing, operations or finance. How to achieve it?
And here comes the interesting part of all this. There are already leaders who have crossed those barriers, there are experts who can guide us, and that's what we want to offer you, the so-called Talent Hackers. Welcome.
Andrés Traslaviña is a talent hacker who works at Whole Foods in Texas. He's from Bogotá. He says he grew up in a bubble.
However, in the 90s.
In those difficult years of drug trafficking, in the nineties, when everything was a bit quite shaken up, my mom was involved in investigating some of these people on both sides, not to seek positive agreements. But this also created fear, right? I don't know if you were in this time and when the idea was born to perhaps leave the country for an exchange, or at that time I played a lot of tennis, I wanted to go to a tennis academy called Bollettieri, which all of us who played tennis wanted to go to Bollettieri.
So my parents gave me two options, you go to Bollettieri or you go on an exchange, and I decided to go on an exchange to study.
So Andrés ends up in the center of the United States, in Nebraska, with very positive elements.
It's a very conservative state, the people are very nice, I made friends very quickly, obviously you learn English much faster, and you're not one of a million Latinos, but you're the only Colombian in the school. So you hook up very quickly in this school, I played tennis, and well, I liked life in Nebraska a lot, except for the cold, but at that time you're exploring and excited about everything. And well, I decided to stay.
I tried to look for a scholarship playing tennis, different universities and I found a scholarship at a university on the Nebraska campus, a Division 3 university. From there I started my career, I studied business administration, I played tennis for a year, but I retired because it's very complicated here. Sports at a university is like a second job.
We were traveling, missing classes. On Fridays and Mondays you'd arrive very tired. Well, I started looking to see how I could get another job with the limitations that an immigrant has, you know?
to support myself and replace the scholarship. I worked in the cafeteria, I worked in the computer room. Then I went to be an RA, you know?
Which is the resident advisor, right? Because there they pay for your room and board. And among all this, well, I found a way to stay at the university.
I finished my university career and had many excellent experiences.
That curious mind of Andrés and those desires to know the world led him to have several learnings, to live in an incredible country. And one could also say to work in a company dreamed of by many.
I did an exchange program also in Japan, where I lived for a year learning Japanese, living all the business culture theme in Japan. I returned, did an internship at Disney. I loved that summer internship and applied again for a more specialized program called Advanced Internship.
And I went back to Disney for six months. In the end, well, I had to graduate. I graduated from university and had two options.
Disney offered me to stay on the international recruitment team. Imagine, it was a dream job for me. But the restriction was that they couldn't sponsor my visa.
So, I would have to use my OPT or this year they give you after leaving university and then see how you could stay. Or the University of Nebraska offered me a position as a recruiter to go to schools and bring more students to this university with the option of sponsoring my scholarship.
Uff, what a dilemma I had. Work in a dream company like Disney or work in a place that could give me the work visa. And that decision would mark his path as a talent hacker.
So Andrés decided to work at the university. Besides, he was accompanied by his sister and this allowed him to study an MBA under a mantra that his parents gave him.
From a very young age, my mother and father always, I mean, you don't spend what you don't have, you don't have a debt. And it has always been like the philosophy of trying to find ways to afford things that otherwise would be almost unattainable, right? Obviously with these ways of doing it I found it.
While I was working, I was doing the MBA, night classes, I was enjoying this a lot. But you always have that link with what you really want to do and what you're doing because the H1B ties you a lot to the organization and ties you to your job. Unfortunately, there are many people who are in companies where they are not comfortable or with people or bosses or environments where it is really very difficult.
My case wasn't that.
In that master's degree, he had a frustration. A frustration that led him to change his course.
I came out of a Managerial Accounting class and I told the professor, I can't take it anymore, I'm lost, I don't understand what's happening. And he told me, relax, you're doing well, you're going to pass the class. And I left very frustrated because passing the class in a university or in school is a system, it's a strategy, but I don't know if it's what will give you what you want to learn, to move forward.
I met someone who was studying psychology and he told me, look, there's a professor who came back from two years of an illness, he didn't give me details and he's teaching this class, sign up because the class fills up immediately. And the man had suffered from leukemia for two years and came back, he was already recovered, and came back to teach this class called positive psychology. I entered the class, I loved it and I said, no, I'm going to change careers, I'm going to do a master's in psychology.
This man left me teachings and gave me like the space to understand that what I was looking for was more than success, happiness. And I started to study this branch of positive psychology very deeply. This branch only started in 1991 with a...
Seligman.
A pioneer called Martin Seligman. I took a class with Tal Ben-Shahar Online, who was the man who started this happiness class at Harvard. I loved it.
I got involved in the subject. I graduated from university with my master's in psychology. I transferred my H1B to a nonprofit startup in Omaha, which was a very big city.
And from there I embarked on this journey to find a little more, how I could find happiness and how I could turn this into a career.
After the entrepreneurship, Andrés returns to the university now as a recruiter. And there he changes to a talent consultancy that leads him to travel around the world, being very successful. But something wasn't right.
And in this journey of travels I found this theme of... I was being very successful. I felt very good talking to our CEOs, traveling first class.
When you arrived at the hotel they invited you to eat and well you were on and active all the time. And after three years of doing this, I had a very deep void, right? Because you find yourself very deeply with your clients.
And I'm being a little vulnerable here with you because I think it's the purpose. But you distance yourself a lot from your family, from your friends and from yourself, right? So, I kept looking for that answer to what I studied and what I wanted to continue, like focusing my career which was the theme of happiness.
I'll tell you two very quick stories with Talent Plus. In 2008 we went to open an office in Latin America. We decided that Santiago was the place.
I went there to live for six months. The CEO called me saying the economy here has broken. I mean, this is super bad.
We can't continue with the initiative to open the office in Latin America. Come back. And I said no.
I mean, precisely because the economy in the United States is very bad. We have to keep doing this. Here this theme is fitting very well.
Why don't you let me? And instead of Santiago, I'm going to Colombia where I know people. We can open a small office.
We don't have to rent space. We'll figure it out and we'll open our Talent Plus office in Colombia. We rented some offices like in WeWork, in a place called Regus, there near Hacienda Santa Bárbara.
Anyway, but we traveled a lot of time between Nebraska, Peru, Santiago, Bogotá. Still putting all my effort, all my soul into this work.
On one of his trips in the United States, he enters a supermarket.
And one day, arriving in Omaha, I walked in and entered this supermarket that they had just opened in 2004, called Whole Foods Market. Hey, I entered and looked at the people and the happy cashiers, the person who was a barista, serving people with an incredible attitude, the smells, the cheeses. It was like a Disneyland for foodies.
And at that moment I decided to be part of the company.
So, this Bogotá native dreams of working in this new supermarket chain, but he has no experience in the sector. That said, he has a lot of determination, curiosity and some key ideas to achieve it.
In Peru there was a supermarket called Wong, intentionally. Intentionally, I wanted them to be my clients to try to apply this Whole Foods philosophy and learn about the supermarket theme, right? Its CEO, an incredible person and one of the best CEOs I know so far, Juan Manuel Parada, loved the theme and we worked with Suncosu for Wong and Suncosu for a long time.
And well, in this journey, in this theme I already had very clear what I wanted to do, it was to go to work at Whole Foods Market. I started to read a lot, John Mackey, obviously our founder has resources on YouTube, there are already many cases in universities where they have studied Whole Foods Market as a success case, right? So, I read, learned about the culture, about the ingredients that made Whole Foods Market a successful company.
And the theme that I didn't share with you that there's always a personal part that sometimes doesn't allow you to take the steps you want, right? Already at this time I was married, my wife worked at the University of Nebraska, she has a very special profession, like your mom, she does paleontology on the plant side. So, I mean, there's one position in each university, it's not that she can teach biology in all universities, but we took the risk in 2010 and moved to Austin.
She could take a sabbatical at the University of Texas. And I came to explore to see how I could enter Whole Foods Market.
A phrase from the founder of Whole Foods says that to learn and grow one has to dare and be willing to make mistakes. Andrés dared, he went to Austin, to Austin, Texas, because well, that's where Whole Foods headquarters is. The thing is, he went without even having a first job interview.
We bought an apartment two blocks from Whole Foods and on Monday after having arrived, I said I'm going to go to Whole Foods and I'm going to meet someone and obviously I'm going to enter. Coincidentally, Whole Foods Market didn't have in human resources, this part of talent, of recruitment, didn't have a recruitment division. I mean, there wasn't a VP of Talent Acquisition, there wasn't a recruitment strategy which had been my theme for many years.
In the process of the search, I decided to enter a Startup company in Austin, where a friend of the founders told me look, this company is trying to do a LinkedIn but for Higher Ed. And I obviously have been very close to education and when they started talking to me about a platform similar to LinkedIn to help students connect with work it seemed incredible to me. And we started.
We had eight people, this company grew to 96, but it was a startup and there came a time when we had to sell the company. I think selling them to universities is not easy. Look, universities have a lot of effort and resources for the recruitment part, but for the Career Services part and to help students fit in with jobs, these Career Services offices are totally saturated.
The people who are there are mostly academics, they don't have this experimental part where students. And now I live it, right? It's incredible the number of students who don't know how to put together a resume, who don't know what they want to do, who don't even know what their three strengths or their three weaknesses are.
I mean, this class is, I imagine it exists in many universities, but it's very much needed. This company was sold to Blackboard, which was an education company that I imagine is still standing. The day we sold it, after a lot of suffering because we had to go from 96, we went back again to 12, a very hard part.
The day they sold the company, Andrés decided to return to that dream, to head towards that previous dream.
I decided to go to the Whole Foods Market page to look at jobs, which has never been my approach to search. And I saw a corporate recruitment position for the Austin offices. Imagine.
I don't know if it was my level, but I immediately said, OK, this position is the one that's going to hook me. And it was the first corporate position they opened in the offices to start opening a recruitment strategy. Well, obviously I found a way to know who the hiring manager was.
I interviewed very normally. The truth is it wasn't, I mean, I had met John Mackey there.
To clarify, John Mackey founded Whole Foods and is one of the most important Texan entrepreneurs. And something I learned is that if Texas were a country it would be number 10 if measured by GDP, by Gross Domestic Product. And besides, John Mackey is one of the standard-bearers of organic food sustainability.
I wasn't going to use that to try to enter the organization, right? No, nothing ever worked.
But it's that I know you had met him, I mean, at events there in Austin.
So, three times I've run into him at the airport. I ran into him at an airport, I went, I talked to him and said John, your company is incredible, I'm studying, he's very simple, imagine a Warren Buffett of his industry, right? At Whole Foods Market, living in Whole Foods, I ran into him many times in the store because he does his shopping there and without being very...
At the one on Sixth, that's what it's called, Sixth, right?
Yes, on Sixth, where the first Whole Foods started in 1980, now we have the Flagship and John went every Friday afternoons without going unnoticed, he followed us a couple of times there. But there was an event at UT where John went to speak, it was when I was still in this startup, he was going to talk about the theme of careers and I put on a backpack and snuck in there as a student. And in the part of asking questions, I stood up and I have that on video, even because someone recorded it and sent it to me later, many years late.
I said, look, John, how does one get into your company to work here in Austin? Because applying is harder than teaching a dolphin to fly. That was the code I gave.
And he told me, look, you have to be flexible because we have offices in 12 regions. If you want to come here and be the VP of something, no, you have to go through many steps. But if you want to get to Whole Foods Market, I know that someday you'll get to something like that, he told me.
Anyway, when I interviewed for my recruitment position, I think I cried in that interview. People were obviously impressed with everything I knew about Whole Foods. After hiring my boss, he told me that there was a discussion where some people said that I might be a bit too overqualified and that I might have difficulties getting the position because of that, but in the end, I got in.
Well then, what is this talent hacker doing today?
And this was in 2014 and up until now I'm still in the role that I love. Obviously, our position has evolved. Now we have 22 people on the team.
I brought in our VP and at this moment I'm solely focused on executive recruitment because from very early on, due to what I've done in the past, I love Crafted Recruiting. I love working with CEOs, with CFOs, with TMOs, developing that trust. And well, to make the story shorter, which is getting a bit long, well today I'm very happy with what I'm doing.
Still in search of happiness. I mean, it's not something you find one day, but something you have to work on.
Source:
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