Today's episode is another my favorite Tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. My extract on today's show is from my chat with Kendra Banks. Kendra is the Managing director for Australia and New Zealand at Seek and if you live in Australia, you've probably used Seek at some point in your career and for overseas listeners. Seek
is Australia's number one employment marketplace. Kendra has had an amazing career and has worked in senior marketing roles at Cole's where she was the general manager for Customer Insight and Cole's Brand, and also in London at Tesco. Kendra holds a master's in European Politics at the College of Europe, where she was a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, and prior to this, Kendra completed a Bachelor of Economics and Mathematics at Yale University.
So in my extract from my chat with Kendra, we talk about how her executive team at Seek make their biggest decisions, which I found fascinating because this was recorded during COVID where they were making a lot of big decisions given the plummeting unemployment rate. So let's head on
over to Kendra. I'm wondering with the decisions that you have to make as a leadership team, like, are their strategies that you would deliberately use to make better decisions or try to remove emotion from some of the big decisions, because I would imagine, like during March and April there would have been some very emotional decisions to make as a business.
There were, yeah, and look some of them were a lot of them were around our people in terms of how quickly we were going to mandate working from home, and we ended up going more on the earlier side of businesses to say, not, you know, everyone just work from home. This is very uncertain, let's see what's panning out.
But also how we dealt with our customers. So on the hiring side, we've one of the key decisions we had was around how much support we give to customers who have pre purchased advertising packages with us, So they would have said, oh, you know, across the next year, we're going to hire five hundred people so we'll buy this kind of level of investment with you. Now, for a lot of those customers, that five hundred dropped to nearly zero, you know, overnight, And so how we dealt
with that was really important. Probably the key approach we use in making decisions, which was relevant there but I think is relevant for other decisions as well, is setting up what are the principles we're using to make this decision and which are the most important. So in that case, we had different factors to look at. We had obviously a financial factor. If we were going to refund customers a lot of money, that was going to be a significant financial impact. We had are we looking short term
or long term? Is it better to keep the the long term loyalty of a customer or the short term financial gain? What are our competitors doing and what you know, if we're in our customer's shoes, what would we want to see? And we decided that our most important principle there was we wanted to be proactive with whatever we offered. We didn't want to have customers coming to us and
asking We wanted to be proactive. And once we decided that principle, that forced everything else into place, there's only so many things we can do proactively. There's only so many things we can do quickly and simply. And if we wanted to err on the side of generosity because we'd rather keep the customer for the long term, then actually there was only a handful of options that would
even make sense. So we were able to kind of narrow down a very complex, ambiguous question about how we were going to support our customers to a narrower set of options that we could look at and make a decision quickly.
And in terms of deciding on what those principles are and how much each of them will be weighted, is that a group decision or is that something you'd think about before harnessing the collective wisdom of the group to make a decision.
We'd probably you know, there are probably one or two people who would lead the structuring up of that thinking, but then we would take it to a group. So in that case, it would have been my leadership team, but also in consultation with you know, our finance team and executive leadership. Because it was a big, big decision, very symbolic decision in terms of how we relate to
our customers. But I think it helps for one or two people to kind of structure up well, this is how we're thinking about it, and then you've got kind of a straw man for everyone to look at and debate and discuss, just to keep things flowing quickly.
That is it for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I linked to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds of your date to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.