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Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters on Talent Talks. And catch up on previous episodes of The Talent Revolution—a podcast dedicated to talent acquisition specialists, people leaders, and CEOs who want to hire better humans, and build stronger teams.
Know someone who'd be great on Talent Talks? Email us at podcast@pinpointhq.com
Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks. Quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, Founder and CEO here at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Fodini Charalambous, Talent Business Partner at Mountain Warehouse. They're one of our brilliant customers, and Fodini has been part of the TA team at Mountain Warehouse for a number of years.
True expert in recruiting for retail and all the challenges that come along with that. You ready for some questions?
Fodini Charalambous: I am. Thank you for having me.
Tom Hacquoil: No, thanks for joining us. It's great to see you. So let's dive right in. So if you weren't in recruitment, what would you be doing?
Fodini Charalambous: So I've thought about this a lot actually as you do.
It might be a bit of a cop out answer because this is partly what I do, but I think I'd really dedicate my career to diversity and inclusion. So within the workspace that is, it's something that's really dear to me. I'm really passionate about that and I think that I just place a lot of value in having diverse teams in a business that champions equity.
The actual value that a business can see, an actual return on investment can be tangibly seen from focusing on D&I. And I'm just passionate about creating those really fair and equitable practices within a business, which I do partly do actually in my role now. So I'm very fortunate to have that.
But I'd probably just focus on that if I wasn't in my current role.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes perfect sense. And as you say, you are doing a little bit of that in the role. Yes. But I guess if you were just to dig in on that a little bit, if you weren't doing it in the way that you're doing it today, in the sort of TA role, do you think you'd be doing a kind of DEI focused role within a business or you'd be like a consultant externally helping other organizations think about this stuff better?
Fodini Charalambous: I think I'd love to do it within a business. I think that's a really great place to start, especially if I was to take a career change into that direction. I think I would start off within the confines of a business. I love working for a brand. I love working for something tangible and for people within a brand that are really passionate and want to be there.
But I absolutely would not be opposed to considering working with multiple brands from that sort of consultation perspective. Yeah, I'd be really open to it. I think it's the making the impact bit that's really important to me.
Tom Hacquoil: Sure, no. Believe that and share that perspective quite widely here
I think. So obviously we've talked about the fact that you do a little bit of that in your current role, but I guess give us a bit of a broader picture, like what is the sort of 60 second summary of how you spend your time at Mountain Warehouse?
Fodini Charalambous: So I'll give you like a current snapshot which is actually really heavy on our Pinpoint implementation, which is really exciting.
So we're going live super. And it's been a journey and a really exciting one to see what we're actually gonna be able to show our teams and the changes and the new efficiencies that we're gonna be able to bring in. So we're actually at the training design phase of that. And we are also, launching a whole suite of systems in the business across payroll, HR, learning, and recruitment. So this has been a big project. So I've loved working with different teams, different stakeholders, subject matter experts. So that's a big chunk of my time at the moment. Within that, I'm also spending a lot of time creating content for our new careers page, which again is through Pinpoint, which is very exciting.
But that's been amazing to just be able to capture the amazing people in our business. I look after five people in the Talent Acquisition team. They are incredible and they look after head office and retail between them. And then I look after diversity and inclusion within the business and have a coordinator that supports me with that as well.
So that is my role in a nutshell.
Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. And you touched on the fact that you've got five folks in the team at the moment, but for those listeners who don't know Mountain Warehouse super intimately, maybe they're not from the UK and things like that. Yeah. Could you just give us like a brief sense of what the business is and how big you are?
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah, absolutely.
So Mountain Warehouse is a value driven retailer, so we have been in the UK on the high street since 1997. And we've had amazing growth. We're so lucky in a very volatile sort of retail space that this business is doing so well and growing and exponentially. We are now just shy of 400 stores, so we're waiting for a big ring the bell moment when we hit that 400 store milestone.
We are across lots of different countries, including Canada, America New Zealand, Australia, and in Europe. We are in Poland, Germany, Austria. As well as the UK and ROI. And I work in our London Victoria Head office and my team actually spans across all of the business. So we look after between us head office, UK retail and international retail.
Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. Great summary. Really helps people just to wrap their head around where your perspective's coming from.
Fodini Charalambous: Absolutely.
Tom Hacquoil: So we've talked a bit about the business and you've talked about being this kind of values driven retailer, which is awesome. And you also talked a little bit there about some of the work you're doing on the career site to attract folks.
Fodini Charalambous: Mm-hmm.
Tom Hacquoil: What is the biggest thing you guys are doing right now to attract the best candidates and create that kind of amazing candidate experience?
Fodini Charalambous: I think it goes back to a little bit of what I mentioned before, but. We are really lucky to be working for a successful growth retailer. And that is actually something that appeals to a lot of the candidates that, that we speak to quite a bit.
So the growth itself just offers so many opportunities and space for development which is something that candidates engage with from a really early stage in the TA process. We are super fast paced, very change driven.
And for the right person that's really attractive. Candidate communication is really important to me, so we make sure that as part of the process, they get clear communication, clear timelines. They know what we need, we know what they need. And then it's just a mutual fact finding conversation around their skillset, abilities and also from us if that's gonna work for them.
I think that really does attract people. And just the opportunity to see how different people here have evolved and adapted and also developed. So that's probably the big selling point for us.
Tom Hacquoil: That makes sense. You talk a lot about, basically in a nutshell that just being a really fast-paced environment and I think that growth presents like a real opportunity for people who think about that as a real positive thing.
Yeah. It also, scares a bunch of candidates, I think. When you are thinking about assessing your candidate pool, what's your favorite interview question to ask and why?
Fodini Charalambous: Something that's really important to me and hopefully my team as well, 'cause we talk about this quite a bit, is that their values align to us.
So I think, to engage and retain amazing talent. The conversation needs to go both ways. So they need to want to work for us as much as we want them to be part of the team. So just aligning those values really early on I find is just a really good place to start. So from my perspective, understanding what makes them tick makes my job easier so I can engage with them on that level and I can help navigate that conversation.
It also just gives a realistic view on if we're the right business for them.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah.
Fodini Charalambous: So I think honesty is the best policy. I try and create a environment where that can be the case for both our end and the candidates end. And just getting into that detail from the early stages of the TA journey.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, it really resonates. I think we do that ourselves here in our own recruitment process, right? I join many interviews, or someone at my level joins many interviews. We see our role as trying to convince folks not to join. We lean really heavily into here's all the bad stuff about working at Pinpoint and here's the challenge and here's what you need to know and if you still wanna be here after hearing all of that, we feel like our values are pretty well aligned because I think we think about what it means to be at Pinpoint much the same way you do about Mountain Warehouse.
Fodini Charalambous: Absolutely.
Tom Hacquoil: Good to see how you're approaching that.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah. I love that.
Tom Hacquoil: Just sprucing it up a bit and chucking a bit of a wildcard question. I think I already know the answer to this or have a sense.
Fodini Charalambous: Okay.
Tom Hacquoil: Based on your earlier commentary. But if you were gonna go and deliver like a big Ted Talk next week to a big audience what topic would you pick?
Fodini Charalambous: Oh, okay, great. I would talk about I think it's just bringing it back to what I said before. You're right. I think I'd be talking about, creating equitable processes in not just the recruitment process necessarily, but in a business in the wider business. So that might be for internal opportunities that might be for external recruitment, that might be for things like secondments or, it would just be around how to assess people based on their skill, based on what they've contributed to this business and what we've tangibly seen them being able to do. Rather than any sort of personal feelings we might have about people or any relationships that we might have with people.
And just really bringing that to the conversation. It's just really important for a business to be able to map where their talent actually sits and confidently say, okay, I'm now gonna be working on this. Who are the best people in this business to bring and why? And being able to assess it that way.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, look, I love that. And it's remarkable to me even today how few businesses are capable of doing that properly. Yeah. Yeah. Really resonates.
Fodini Charalambous: Personal relationship really comes into it, and I don't think people realize how much that subjectivity can pierce into these processes without us realizing.
Tom Hacquoil: Well it's just that unconscious bias and it's one of the variables in that mix. I think it's interesting to think about how that evolves in this sort of shift away from in-person working where relationships are very easy to forge.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: Away into this kind of distributed remote workforce for many organizations.
And is that a net positive? Because people are much less reliant on relationships and much more on skills or actually, does this problem still kind of pervade because there's still an element of people working together and then they're marginalizing up. Like it's just really interesting how these two things correlate or don't.
Fodini Charalambous: And there's so many different lenses to look at it.
Tom Hacquoil: There are, but I think just making a conscious effort to go look at it in the first place is something that I think people aren't doing enough of. So I hear you loud and clear on that. When we talk about metrics and reporting and the lens at which we look through things, you've talked a lot about that lens in the context of equity and inclusion, which is awesome.
When you think about it in the context of, for the hiring metrics specifically in that retail space.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: What's that hero metric. What's the thing that you say, 'Hey, this is the most important thing we need to track to show that we're doing our jobs well at Mountain Warehouse'.
Fodini Charalambous: Good question.
I guess it depends what I'm thinking. Am I thinking with my budget hat on, or candidate experience hat or am I thinking about the efficiency in the process? I think if I try and combine everything the most successful metrics for me are the ones that can objectively indicate a successful hire.
So that is retention and internal progression metrics. So we work really closely with the wider people, team at Mountain Warehouse to identify those. And we're hoping through all our new suite of systems we'll be able to track that a lot more effectively now. But growing talent internally.
Is something that we're really proud of. And we absolutely have opportunities to improve in how we identify that talent, as I've just mentioned. But the success that we've had and the support that we've given to people to grow and develop here has been incredible and we're actually hoping to showcase a lot of that on our new careers page, which is exciting.
But I think for me that's the key. Retention and growth.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes a great deal of sense and it's nice to have somebody think about the sort of long term impact of the hires and the work that you're doing rather than just the near term stuff that reflects the process you're in day to day.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
I think you can get a lot out of that information, which can then link into the BAU day-to-day pro progress. And how you are then supporting your teams and having slightly different conversations maybe with candidates and how to just identify the right people for roles.
Tom Hacquoil: That makes sense.
I just I often see people rush to first order metrics for example, time to hire, which is great. Yeah. Crucially important, but really efficient time to hire and very low retention isn't an outcome to celebrate. So I like that you're focusing on that longer term impact.
Makes sense.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah. We try to, and to be honest, Mountain Warehouse is just such an agile business. So a lot of the time those type of metrics don't necessarily add the value here, maybe as they would in other businesses. And the reason being is that we do move very quickly. So we might take a brief for a role and it might change because the business has decided that we are, I don't know, for example, buying a new brand or launching in a new country.
We work for the business and we work to support the business changes and growth. So those metrics don't necessarily mean success for us. So we try and focus on the ones that do.
Tom Hacquoil: I love that it just reflects the maturity of the TA function within the business. Great stuff. So this sort of builds into the next question, right?
Which is like, when you look at TA people in general, where do you think the sort of biggest skills gap is for folks in the TA function right now?
Fodini Charalambous: I don't wanna speak on all my peers behalf but possibly tech. I find that there's a bit of resistance in the TA industry just from conversations I've had with the network and my peer group.
And there are some amazing tech businesses that are emerging in the people space and the TA space more specifically. Which, would broaden what we're doing exponentially. I think that's maybe where we need to open up our mindset around the possibility of using tech in a effective way within the industry.
Tom Hacquoil: I tend to agree. Obviously, I come at it from the tech perspective.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: And I think there's some incredibly smart people in the TA industry.
Fodini Charalambous: I agree.
Tom Hacquoil: And it frustrates me because they're achieving incredible things. But they're doing it,
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: In an inefficient way.
And actually, if they're leveraging technology better or leveraging data better, they take the smarts and amplify them massively, but that opportunity's often missed. So I hear you on that.
Fodini Charalambous: Absolutely.
Tom Hacquoil: Second wildcard question, and I think it's one that's specific to Mountain Warehouse, but like Mountain Warehouse, again, for those who don't know, it's quite an adventurous brand, right?
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: And always interested in, if you were going out and doing some extreme odd, adventurous endeavor, like climb Mount Everest or whatever, what would you do?
Fodini Charalambous: Oh, me personally?
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. You personally, yeah.
Fodini Charalambous: Interestingly I'm planning something at the moment. Yeah. So my husband's very into the adventure. I join him as much as I can. Our next plan is to climb up Snowden in April. Nice. So I said, what do you want for your birthday? And he said, I wanna climb Snowden. So that's what we're planning at the moment. We're big outdoor people. We love being outside. We don't do anything like Everest, so we're not at that level of extreme sport.
But we have a dog and we just love being outside as much as possible. And the same with all our friends. So that's what we're doing next. So we are planning a stay around Snowden for a long weekend and then to climb it.
Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. That's really cool. Yeah I'm also not a Mount Everest caliber climber, but I've done the three peaks, including Snowden.
Fodini Charalambous: Oh, nice.
Tom Hacquoil: And it was awesome, yeah, it was really good time so I'm sure you'll love that.
Did
Fodini Charalambous: you do it in the 24 hour challenge set up.
Tom Hacquoil: 22 hours and 10 minutes.
Fodini Charalambous: Brilliant.
Tom Hacquoil: We took, yeah. Yeah.
Fodini Charalambous: Well done.
Tom Hacquoil: I underestimated the amount of driving.
Fodini Charalambous: Oh, did you drive yourselves?
Tom Hacquoil: We took it in interns, but there was a group of us from work, but it was really good, I have to say.
I really enjoyed it. I don't live in the UK so it was nice to see the sights for me as well.
But you were saying your husband's done three peaks as well.
Fodini Charalambous: He did the three peaks in 24 hours. He did about similar, about 22.
Tom Hacquoil: Wow.
Fodini Charalambous: I feel like they cheated now based on what you said 'cause they had a driver.
Tom Hacquoil: Oh, that's luxury. We were not posh enough enough for a driver.
Fodini Charalambous: They were all sleeping in the minivan. 'cause they did it in a group. So they had a minivan and a driver, so.
Tom Hacquoil: That's amazing. Oh well tell him that I'm more hardcore than him. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.
Fodini Charalambous: I'll let him know.
Tom Hacquoil: I feel good about myself now. Thank you for that. Awesome. That's really cool.
I hope you enjoy that and I'm sure you're gonna do that in full Mountain Warehouse swag.
Fodini Charalambous: Absolutely.
Tom Hacquoil: Changing tact, so can't have a conversation these days without talking about AI. Rightly, wrongly. Yeah. What's your take? What do you understand about what's happening in the AI arena in our space right now?
How do you think it's impacting the world we all live in?
Fodini Charalambous: It is crazy 'cause it can be overwhelming. There's an overload of information at the moment with regards to AI. But I do think there's so many opportunities. When it's used correctly and within the right realms. I think it really can open a whole new host of opportunities for businesses.
Some of my reservations are around risking that human element to a lot of processes, which can come with overuse. Because I think creating and maintaining that great candidate experiences should never be affected. But that aside, I think honestly the scope of AI within TA is really exciting.
So from things like talent mapping, internal talent and external talent, which can then generate, how we can grow the business, to things like interview scoring to, placing objectivity at all parts of the process to support them with resourcing. That's really invaluable.
For small lean teams, like what we have at Mountain Warehouse, being able to have that support is amazing. And then just things that we do see now already, but they can be enhanced, like anonymized screening or candidate journey improvements. Honestly the list can go on. It's just really exciting to see the different opportunities that come.
And I am always open to hearing about them and understanding how and why we can use them. And then just making a judgment call from there based on everything else we value in our process, if it's the right solution for us.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Look, I massively agree with you. I think it is interesting to think about that sort of dichotomy between the opportunity presented by AI and some of the reservations around tech adoption.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: That you referenced earlier. But I think if we can get a bit of a meeting of the minds there over the next couple of years, we'll see some huge wins. Yeah, we have to be sensitive about the rollout, but I do think there's huge opportunity there. It'd be great to see how that plays out.
Fodini Charalambous: Definitely.
Tom Hacquoil: 10th and final question. We're still arguably close to a new year here, early February 25. Yeah. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing talent leaders in 2025?
Fodini Charalambous: There's a lot of moving blocks at the moment. And I do think we're going through a big change curve across talent and people as a whole.
Something that is already a huge conversation, and I think it's just only gonna get bigger and more honed is going back to creating equitable processes. I think this conversation sometimes can get a little bit left behind, but I don't, I just don't think there's gonna be space for that anymore.
I think it should influence everything that we do in our people processes. We're living in a society where oversharing, criticizing, giving opinions is the norm. So businesses with more old school or archaic practices just will rightly be called out. So I think that's just really important to just focus on, not just for retail, but across the board. And then similarly as before with AI, I think we will get left behind if we don't embrace some of this. And it's becoming more and more prominent. So those two are big for me. And I'm actually loving where they are going in terms of opportunities to bring them into our processes and how we work.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Markets evolving. Don't get left behind by AI and don't leave behind important things like DEI whilst we adapt to changing conditions. Makes a load of sense.
Fodini Charalambous: Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: Brilliant. Look, we've done 10 questions. Thank you so much for joining me, Fodini. Really appreciate it.
Fodini Charalambous: Thank you for having me.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, you can follow Fodini on LinkedIn if you wanna stay up to date. We'll put links to her LinkedIn profile and to Mountain Warehouse's swanky new career site as and when it goes live in the very near future. Go do check out all the work that Fodini and the team have put in there. It's fantastic stuff.
Looking forward to seeing that go live soon. And thank you all for listening. If you know anybody that'd be a great fit for Talent Talks, please get them in touch with us and enjoy the day. All the best.
Fodini Charalambous: Thank you.