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Tracey Arnish is VP and head of HR at Google Cloud. She became interested in HR after taking an organizational behavior class in college, and went on to work in sports and the public sector before joining Google Cloud. Arnish recently spoke to HR Brew about how the company scaled hiring during Covid-19.
How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? I’m responsible for developing and growing a vibrant culture that aligns our employees across Cloud to a core vision and purpose.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? Many people still may think of HR as “personnel,” where the job is to simply hire and pay people. However, when an organization truly understands the value of HR, they leverage their HR partners as strategic advisors to their business.
As strategic advisors, we have the benefit of seeing a business end-to-end. This positions us to have a unique perspective on everything from how the business is organized, the talent gaps that exist, and how the external environment should influence our business strategy.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job? We’ve seen incredible employee growth at Google Cloud over the last three years—roughly half of our employees were hired during the pandemic! That means that most of our employees have never met each other or their manager in-person, had lunch with their team, or attended a live off-site—it’s all been virtual. In fact, we’ve onboarded tens of thousands of Cloud “Nooglers” through newly developed virtual onboarding experiences.
As an HR leader, this sets up a great challenge in uniting our entire organization behind our vision for Cloud.
How were you able to scale hiring in such a short amount of time? There’s a huge amount of emphasis and focus that’s placed on recruiting…and there’s a large focus on building capability in our managers to ensure that they have the understanding about the role that they [hire] and the importance that they play in the recruiting process, [regarding] how to make sure we hire inclusively, [and] ensure that we get the diversity in thought and experiences.
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What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why? We now see employees really seeking out flexibility in work location and hours, strong benefits packages, and substantial growth opportunities, and there continue to be emerging technologies to meet this moment. By leveraging data and analytics that optimize for choice, flexibility, and the career ambitions of their people, against the work that is the most critical for the organization, companies can thrive in this new environment.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why? As much as I deeply appreciate all the rapidly evolving technologies that have emerged to elevate our work in the HR field, I do remain cautious of viewing machine learning as the ultimate answer to all HR strategy. It’s really a complement to what our recruiters are doing, bringing a level of art to the science of candidate selection. Our best recruiters sift through the hundreds of thousands of résumés Google Cloud receives each year to spot those unique individuals who may have spent their entire careers in a seemingly unrelated field but who have unexpectedly transferable skills…HR technologies are amazing tools, but we’ll need to continue to lean heavily on the expertise, emotional intelligence, and collaborative problem-solving abilities of humans for many years to come.
Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why. I’m increasingly excited about the power of data analytics and how it can be used to drive insights into talent and help companies build meaningful employee experiences. Predictive analytics allows companies and HR leaders to spend less time on diagnosis and analysis and more time [building] meaningful responses to key issues and making a difference in their workplace.
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