The buck stops with you, and you need to find a way,’ says Thomas Byun
A central theme in Thomas Byun’s approach as a leader in HR and talent acquisition is taking real ownership of the role and its responsibilities while acting honestly and honourably.
“No matter what happens across the function, you’re sitting in the chair and you’re responsible for the function that you govern,” says the global director of talent acquisition at engineering consulting company Hatch. “The buck stops with you, and you need to find a way, regardless of whatever the reasons are.”
According to Byun, early in his career, he tried using a lack of resources or support to explain gaps in reaching objectives, but he learned quickly that nobody cared — and he refuses to let his own team fall back on the same logic.
The principle applies equally to errors, he says. “If you make a mistake, own it, fess up to it, and learn from it,” he says. “Conducting yourself in a very honourable way, ensuring that you’re very keen to the thoughts of others, and being respectful to others has carried me through my entire career.”
Talent acquisition a partner in business strategy
Byun’s stance on accountability shapes how he defines talent acquisition success and he believes that the function exists to enable, not obstruct.
“The raison d’être for talent acquisition is to be an effective business partner to contribute to the growth of a company,” he says. “In some scenarios that I’ve seen, talent acquisition and HR can be seen as a business hindrance, but we’re the ambassadors of our company and our company’s culture in each of our markets.”
Byun believes that talent acquisition can no longer behave like a transactional “fillers of roles” service if it wants a seat at the table along with the rest of HR and other business leaders. “The role that I see talent acquisition playing more and more of is a partnership with succession planning, leadership planning, and long-term resource planning,” he says.
He also expects the function to provide hard market intelligence. “We’re close to the market and we’re seeing what the market is saying in terms of candidate movement and candidate migration,” he says.
Talent acquisition from the ground up
When Byun graduated from university, there was no carefully plotted route into HR. A single summer role at a grocery store dropped him into a recruitment role and set him on a path that started on a local retail floor and has brought him to a global mandate at Hatch.
“I had no intention or desire to go into HR — I didn’t even know what human resources was coming out of university,” says Byun.
But a junior recruiter job at the grocery store became his crash course in high-volume hiring and corporate life, introducing him to the basics of recruitment and how it fits into HR, he says. Following the grocery store, Byun found recruitment roles in the corporate and banking sectors, stepping into bigger, more complex mandates until he was running national and then global recruitment functions.
In his early roles, Byun says he learned the basics by recruiting store-level roles at scale. Moving to more corporate roles at companies like Ernst & Young gave him something very different.
“Ernst & Young introduced me to the higher touch, the more sophisticated sort of recruitment methodologies,” he says. “And then, more importantly, managing a recruitment team, being responsible for the strategic direction of the recruitment function, and being accountable to it.”
When Byun moved into a role in the banking sector, overseeing hiring for capital markets, wealth management, and commercial banking, he learned how the financial services sector worked, but he says it highlighted the limits of a siloed position.
“I was one of many directors and not the overall head of recruiting,” he says. He eventually moved to another organization where became global head of recruiting and got his first true taste of managing teams across borders, he says.
Global, harmonized approach to talent acquisition
That experience set him up for his global leadership role in talent acquisition at Hatch. “I have teams in the United States, Chile, India, in South Africa, in Australia, and I interact with them on a daily basis,” he says. “It truly is a global position in every way, in every respect.”
In his role at Hatch, Byun has a direct line with leadership in the organization, reporting to the CHRO and interacting with the CEO almost daily, he says.
“The experience here is unlike any I've experienced in any other industry that I've been in — one day I'm talking to my team in Chile, then the next in South Africa, and then that night I'm on the phone with Australia, talking about what's happening over there and interacting with all of these groups equally,” he says. “What keeps me going is the constant learning and being introduced to new ideas and new facets of recruitment.”
For Byun, having a global perspective exposed gaps in how recruitment was approached and he wanted to avoid the silo effect he had experienced in earlier roles.
“We’ve been on a journey to harmonize the processes and governance of recruitment around the Hatch world,” he says, noting that for years, different regional offices had done things their own way. It was mostly working, but he didn’t think it was a good operating model for a large, global enterprise.
If you’re a 10,000-plus employee company, you need to act like a 10,000-plus employee company, says Byun. “And with that comes governance and similar repeatable processes that can be replicated regardless of location — I'm happy and proud that we were able, over a multi-year journey, to fully harmonize the way we deliver recruitment services, both from an experienced hire standpoint and from a campus standpoint across all of our regions.”
An example of accountability for a global team
Byun says that this harmonization of recruitment processes across the global organization still allows for legal and cultural nuance, with the aim of having about 80 per cent of activity run the same way from country to country.
“Each of my regions has a recruitment leader, and they’re responsible for ensuring that they’re my ambassador in the region,” says Byun, noting that those leaders must represent the global perspective as strongly as the local one and ensure his expectations has the team leader land with front-line recruiters, rather than disappearing in translation.
The pressure to modernize, centralize and digitize recruitment isn’t easing for the talent acquisition function, according to Byun. “When transformational fatigue has hit, the early warning signs that I’ve seen have been apathy, sarcasm, cynicism, and detractors,” he says.
Byun says he fights that slide with straightforward communication to his team, leaning into his philosophy of ownership and honour. “I have always found that being honest and transparent, is one of the most effective ways of continuing to keep engagement,” he says.
Looking ahead, Byun believes that HR and talent acquisition leaders will win or lose on their willingness to confront people with the truth rather than spin. “This generation, more than any other, requires transparency,” he says.
