Building a Skills-First Workforce at Enterprise Scale with Astad Dhunjisha of AT&T

Asad Dhunjisha: If you think about how people can consume courses, how they can create their own capabilities, how we will even pay towards their tuition and getting their master's degrees, we are creating opportunities for people to develop themselves, learn and grow into bigger roles. And today you find that a lot of our middle managers are people who probably started in a retail store and worked themselves up the chain. And we have a lot of these examples. And this is one of those few places which it feels good that just because you started at a level doesn't mean that you will be there for the rest of your career or that you have to leave the company in order to do something else.

Ryan Dull: Hello and welcome to the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. I'm your host Ryan Dull and on this show we interview today's industry leaders in talent acquisition to discuss challenges, best practices and what the future holds. If you are working in talent acquisition and have always wanted to sit down with your peers at a other companies to exchange ideas and learn, well, this show is the next best thing. Join us each week as we bring you a new expert interview and extract their expertise. This episode is brought to you by SageMark HR. Transform your recruiting practices with leading edge technology. Selecting the right recruiting solutions to enable your strategy is one of the biggest challenges leaders face today. You know technology will help, but searching all the options to find out what will work best for your specific needs can be both overwhelming and time consuming. At SageMark HR, we make selecting the right recruiting technology easy. Our proven process has helped companies such as 3M, um, Comcast, Stryker, Walgreens and many more reach out to us at SageMark HR for a free consultation to learn how we can help you improve results with less stress and confidently change from reacting to leading. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. I'm your host Ryan Dull and today I have a conversation with Asad Tanjisha. Asad is the VP of Talent Acquisition Learning and Development at and T. Welcome to the show.

Asad Dhunjisha: Excited to be with you, Ryan. Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Dull: Yeah, I'm looking forward to our conversation. Let's start out and learn a little bit about you and your background. Uh, maybe how you got started in this space of talent acquisition, learning and development, as well as maybe some roles that you've held leading up to your current role.

Asad Dhunjisha: Love to do that Ryan. So my background, I have been involved in talent acquisition across my career over 20 plus years, but I would consider myself to be foremost an HR professional. Right. I started my career out in the campus recruitment space. Once I Graduated from college, finishing my master's degree. But over the course of the last 20 years I have been managing talent acquisition. I have done a lot of work as an HR business partner. I have also spent time in talent management as well as doing activities such as HR, M&A. So for me I really saw myself as a rounded HR professional. But I do have a, uh, fundamental love for talent acquisition. It was an area that I got introduced to very early on in my career and I always considered talent acquisition as one of the joyful functions in hr. So in HR there are a lot of tough jobs, but it's one of those jobs where I tell my team every single day you are changing people's lives. Every single day you work, every offer changes the trajectory of that person's life. So there is kind of um, an innate reward about being in talent acquisition. My career journey is I started off in India, did HR over there in the banking sector as well as in pharmaceutical sector. A big part of my career was being with a company called Monsanto and I was with them for 14 years and it was a company where I joined them in the front line. And 14 years later I found myself on the HR leadership team. So it was an incredible experience. It was a company that was a true talent factory and built some great HR professionals. From Monsanto, I moved to a company called Experian out in California and I spent three great years out there. I was leading their talent acquisition for function for them globally. Again, an ah, incredible company in the fast paced fintech sector. Very exciting, very engaging, very challenging. And that was the same time that Covid happened. So there was a lot of the pandemic related responses that the company had to put into place. And I joined AT&T about three and a half years ago in 2022 to lead their talent acquisition function as well as I was doing a few other functions like HR for hr. And more recently I've taken on an uh, expanded role where I uh, lead talent acquisition as well as learning and development for AT&T. So I would call this role almost like talent delivery. We are the end to end solution from hiring a person all the way to training them, making them capable and providing them to the business. Right. So it's that seamless delivery of talent from candidate to trained employee that now I have pulled you off and I'm very excited with that.

Ryan Dull: Uh, yeah, that's great. I love that construct. We'll maybe talk a little bit more about that as we get into the conversation. Let's start scoping out a little bit. So I'm sure everyone is familiar with the brand at&t. So scope out a little bit. Maybe size of AT and T nature of all the business units as well as then what your team looks like from a size and scope perspective.

Asad Dhunjisha: Absolutely, absolutely. We are very proud to represent and wear the blue globe. And I will say, Ryan, one of the beauties of working for AT&T among all the other brands that I've ever worked for, really great brands. But the universal awareness of AT and T definitely helps in the talent acquisition space. I always talk about it where when I talk to a candidate, whether it's a senior most executive or somebody at the front line, it is very likely that they know what AT and T is about. So the conversation is, okay, I know the company. What is the role about? In many other companies I worked for, it was very different. It used to be the let me introduce you and tell you what this company is all about. And you'd have to spend time convincing the candidate about the company before they even go down to the role. So AT and T has universal awareness which is really an advantage in our world. That being said, we are also a company that is now 150 years old. People have different perceptions of AT&T. So our recruiters spend a lot of time talking to candidates and showing them the path where when you think about AT and T, you can think about it as a telecom company, but more and more you see us as a technology company. We have a couple of main business lines, right? So we have a wireless business and a big fiber business. So we are in the business of connectivity. We are the ones trying to make sure that any person in the US is connected to each other. Whether it is work, fun, play. We want to make sure that we are providing them that service of connectivity. With that we have a couple of main divisions. We have AT&T business which provides connectivity solutions to small and medium businesses all the way to Fortune 100500 companies. And then we have our mass markets business which is people like you and me. We want a mobile phone service, we need a fiber right now, I'm hoping at ah, some point in time, the conversation you and I are having over the Zoom Call is through pipes that essentially go through AT&T's network. So we are in the business of connectivity. We have our revenue in excess of about $120 billion and we have about 130,000 employees across the globe. As a talent acquisition team, we hire between 25 to 30,000 people each and every Year. This is both external and internal. And we have a uh, team of about 200 plus professionals that manages this operation. So it's talent acquisition factory. We have a lot of frontline hiring. We do hiring for our uh, retail stores, we do hiring for our uh, call centers, we do hiring for our technicians. These are the guys who go out in m, your blue van, making sure that fiber is installed at your house. And then at the same time we also hire significantly in our corporate space. So you think about it, technology, jobs, data sciences, finance, legal, supply chain, hr. So it's a uh, complete operation and we do it end to end.

Ryan Dull: Great. Let's talk a little bit about. As you look at your team in the three and a half years that you have been there, what are some accomplishments or key initiatives or projects that you and your team have worked on in the last three and a half years that you're exceptionally proud of?

Asad Dhunjisha: So the first part I'd like to start off with is the cultural transformation that this company has gone through. And full credit to this goes to our CEO John Stanke. An anecdote for me that I would share is that if you were to look at AT&T maybe five, seven years ago, all the executives who were there pretty much came from within the ranks. And it was a company that had this incredible system where they would hire at junior levels and promote people to the top. So at the top level you would find people who had been at the company 20, 30, 40 plus years. When John came in, he came in with a vision of really saying, listen, I want to balance the ranks. I want this company to be a more market oriented culture rather than an insular culture. And this cultural transformation ensured that he started bringing in executives from the outside. And I remember having a conversation out with him in 2022 when he was interviewing me for the job and I asked him the question, why are we talking? What's the reason? And he talked about the vision of how he wanted to balance out the management ranks, which means ensure that there are people who have this deep, robust internal knowledge, but then balance it out with people who come from the marketplace, who bring in external perspectives, who bring in different ideas and innovation. And I have seen him execute on that vision over the course of these last three years that I've been with the company. So what at&t used to be before to what it is today, that transformation in the culture is significant. And again, if you talk to John, he will probably say that he is halfway through. Right. It's a constant journey. But we have become a much more market oriented company and a much more market oriented culture than we were before. With that, the parallel was to talent acquisition. When we talk about our change as talent acquisition, I would talk about it in two columns, right? There was a column of what we have done as a team. So we have become significantly more efficient. We have brought in new technology platforms, we have started integrating new products and new systems out there. We have changed and put in more assessments, things like that, all the basic things to improve the candidate experience and make our processes much better, better. But then on the other hand, what we've had to do as a TA function is change the way people think about talent and engage with hiring managers. In the past, it was, I would consider our function to be more kind of process oriented and compliance oriented, where we wanted to make sure that we were doing things the right way and we had to flip the script to say we want to become talent oriented. We want to make sure we have the best candidates and the best talent in the industry. And we are changing the way that we are orienting our recruiters to hire for that. So it's no longer just about process compliance. It's about, hey, can I go out there and hunt for talent? There would be points of time where we would like, hey, if I get applicants into the pipeline, I'm good with that. I'm just going to process the applicants and I get my job done. We had to shift that mindset to saying, listen, great candidates are, uh, possibly passive. So we need recruiters who can go out there and search for talent and not just simply take only the people who apply to us. So opening up that funnel and being able to hunt for talent was a very important mental shift and a cultural shift that we were able to create in talent acquisition. So that was one. The other thing I feel really good about is some of the work that we've done with our employer brand. Right. We are a very well known employer brand, but we have had to do a lot of work to make our employer brand more approachable and attractive to the younger generation. There could be points of time where at&t was considered my mom and Pop's phone company, but is it mine? And I think creating the vision that AT&T is not just a telecom company, it's a technology company. If you think about the amount of information that passes through AT&T's networks in a day or a month, it is incredible. We talk about ATT as being a company which is fundamental to the Internet. So if AT&T would go down, guess what? A lot of our Internet would go down. The amount of traffic that we carry for every streaming service, everything else is fundamental. And when you switch that lens on, you suddenly start seeing ATT in a different light. It's not just about, oh, I have my wireless company. It is about work. How people work, how people commute, how people talk and connect with each other, how people entertain themselves, how people study. So we had to make that shift of this is a company that is central to people's existence and central to connectivity. And that was a lot of work that we had to go in with our employer. Brad Last but not least, I think while we are making this shift, shift to being a market based culture. Ryan what I feel really proud about being part of AT&T's legacy. Even though I've been here only three years and there are people in this company who've been there for 30 and 40 plus years. This is still a company that believes in growing people. So there is a lot of what we call internal mobility and upskilling that happens AT and T. We have a lot of examples of people who joined us in the front line. They may have joined us in a call center, they could have joined us in a retail shop. They may or may not have had a degree and they joined AT&T. And then they started building their career and moving to different spots. So we as a company have some very attractive benefits and capabilities in the learning space. So if you think about how people can consume courses, how they can create their own capabilities, how we will even pay towards their tuition and getting their master's degrees, we are creating opportunities for people to develop themselves, learn and grow into bigger roles. And today you find that a lot of our middle managers are people who probably started in a retail store and worked themselves up the chain. And we have a lot of these examples. And this is one of those few places which it feels good that just because you started at A level doesn't mean that you will be there for the rest of your career or that you have to leave the company in order to do something else. And we in talent acquisition create these internal mobility opportunities. And our function in L and D is constantly creating skills in people that can help them grow and develop. So that's another thing that I feel really good about what we do at,

Ryan Dull: AT and T. Yeah, those are great examples. Thank you for sharing those. Let's talk a little bit about performance or measurement and at, AT and T. What matters at, AT and T as, uh, it relates to Performance in talent acquisition. So what metrics or measurements or outcomes really matter?

Asad Dhunjisha: I would consider us to be pretty progressive in that front right now. In any traditional talent acquisition function, you will always talk about, hey, what's your time to hire? What's your load? All those things continue to be there for us at and T, we see them more as like basic hygiene factors, right? I am not truly in a competition to say, hey, I need my time to hire to go down to 20 days, right? So today, hey, we're in the 40 to 50 day mark. I feel good about that, right? The bigger factor that I always hold my recruiters accountable for is the quality of talent, right? Is the hiring manager satisfied with the hire they have and do they feel that they got a candidate that is raising the bar on everybody else in their team? So we want to talk about it as, hey, there are some hygiene metrics that we constantly talk about. Like similarly efficiency, right? We want to be cost effective. When you think about a hiring operation that is hiring 25,000 people a AH year you spend $2,000 or higher versus $1,800 or higher makes a big difference to the company bottom line. So for us, efficiency matters. But again, efficiency alone doesn't get us to where we need to be. So in our world, and I think in any talent acquisition leaders world, they are balancing three basic things, right? In these metrics. The first balancing act is what is the hiring manager expectations? How are we meeting that? Number one, Number two aligned with that is the candidate experience. Does the candidate feel that this is a company that they want to work for? So you can talk about things whether we do around our employment brand or the application experience or the interview experience that they have and saying, was the candidate treated well? So that's the interlocking Venn diagram. And the third piece about this is cost efficiency. I can have a great hiring manager experience and a candidate experience, but if I am spending six to $8,000 per hire, I am not going to be as efficient and I will not be doing a service to the bottom line of this company. So for me, I put the efficiency piece on that. And for us it's this constant balance between these three to say, how do I make the investments, how do I make sure I'm getting the hiring manager's talent they need, how do I ensure that the candidate experience is strong and uh, how do I do it at a cost that is really effective for this business?

Ryan Dull: Yeah, that's great. Sounds like you put a lot of thought into that. Directly aligned to initiatives at the organization. And that's great to see. Let's look forward a little bit. So as you look forward over the next 12 months, what types of priorities or initiatives are bubbling up the most

Asad Dhunjisha: important in our world right now? There are a couple of things that I think are very critical. One part that we are talking a lot about is skills, right? Skills based hiring in a skills based organization. So how do we transform to truly being a skills based organization and a workplace versus just looking at it as purely experiences or qualification based? Right. AT, AT&T, we've tried to eliminate as much as we can of the paper ceiling. So Only less than 5% of our jobs actually need a requisite degree. We talk about it as, hey, if you have the capabilities and the experiences, we would be happy to engage with you. So that's number one. Number two, another initiative for us is really around technology transformation. We are investing a significant amount to really upgrade, uh, our technology stack in talent acquisition and truly embrace agentic AI. So we have a roadmap that by the end of 2026 we would be able to truly implement some AI agents that will help us streamline improve talent acquisition and really try to create that vision of agents working closely with recruiters so that recruiters can spend their time doing what they truly love doing, which is sourcing, finding the candidates, talking to candidates, engaging candidates, making offers, and less time about coordinating an interview time, filling out interview survey forms, collecting interview feedback from 15 hiring managers, collating that into the system, checking all the boxes. Right. So a lot more automation that uh, the agents can do makes the recruiter's life a lot better. So that is kind of some of the vision and the excitement that we're trying to pull.

Ryan Dull: Yeah, that's great. I work with a lot of clients that similar size that are working on very similar initiatives. Very exciting time, very chaotic time as far as all the capabilities that exist and that are emerging and a lot of work goes into that. But I'm really excited about the opportunities that will come out the back end of this time and what the experience will be like for all the stakeholders involved.

Asad Dhunjisha: Absolutely. I, uh, am equally excited. Yeah.

Ryan Dull: Great. Last question I would have for you is what's some advice for the listeners? Our listener group is made up usually of folks who are in TA or interested in ta, but what's a piece of advice that you would share to them?

Asad Dhunjisha: So I had a session recently at the huh, University of Texas Dallas, and in their school of management, they had a class actually on talent acquisition as a person who's been involved in talent acquisition on and off for the last two decades. It was exciting to actually see a class purely focused on talent acquisition. And I talked about it as saying too often, and if you talk to a lot of people of my generation or a lot of my recruiters, talent acquisition wasn't what they grew up wanting to do. It was something that they started their career in some way and then they stumbled into talent acquisition. And I feel this is a function that has become way too important and way too critical for a company to have something be, oh, I'm just going to stumble on and do it right. It wasn't seen as attractive or sexy. It wasn't seen as a place where a lot of professionals would want to spend their careers. And I feel like if you're listening to this podcast or somewhere else, there is so many opportunities in this space. And I think given the requirements for talent, and specifically, even in an AI world where hunting and finding quality talent becomes even more challenging because so much has become generic, right? Every person is taking AI to smoothen out their resume. Every cover letter today is AI generated. So in that world, you still need a quality recruiter in order to identify and engage with talent. And particularly what a great recruiter does is has a good eye for talent. And that is something which is still innate. I don't think that they have yet invented the AI, uh, agent that can create something which says, hey, this person, Asad, is better or worse than Ryan. This still requires human judgment there. And I feel like in that world, making sure that you invest those capabilities and truly understand and spend time reflecting on what is great talent and how can you build your eye towards that is a really good investment to make in your career.

Ryan Dull: That's great advice. Yeah, thank you for that. So, Asad, thank you for sharing your journey and all the details that you provided today. I think it'd be extremely valuable for the audience. I greatly appreciate you. Thank you.

Asad Dhunjisha: Hey, Rai, Happy to talk. And thank you so much for doing this. It's great to see a, uh, talent acquisition podcast.

Ryan Dull: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. If something we said today resonated with you, please subscribe, rate and download our podcast and share the episode with your network. Ready to transform your recruiting practices with leading edge technology just like our other clients at 3M, um, Comcast, Stryker and Walgreens. Then reach out@sagemarkhr.com for a free consultation.