Mark Arell

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:38HostI'm excited to welcome Mark to the Built By People podcast. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestYeah, sure. I'd be happy to. So thank you for having me this morning. So I began my career in the United States Army after having grown up in a military family. So it was something that was expected of me. When I left the Army and joined my first company, I got involved in training and development pretty quickly. And it was something that I think I was very well prepared for, just given all that I had learned in the Army about training soldiers. The Army is still to this day one of the most benchmarked training or learning organizations in the world. So I really learned a lot and got a strong foundation there. My career began to take off as I moved forward into progressively bigger and bigger training and then learning and development jobs, eventually getting into leadership development and then supporting companies with really advancing their strategic initiatives all around people. And so it's culminated with a focus on developing capabilities that companies need to support their growth. Lastly, in a chief learning officer position with my previous company, and now as head of people and culture for Herc Rentals.

▶1:51HostMark, how has your approach to scaling for growth evolved during your 7 years at Herc Rentals, particularly developing internal talent mobility?

▶2:01GuestYeah, it's been quite a journey. 7 years ago when I joined Herc, Herc Rentals was 2 years post-spinoff from a parent company and a brand new publicly traded company on its own, although the business itself was about 56 years old at that point. So Herc was really in the very beginning of coming into its own, and I really had to meet the company where they were at that point, and it was really a lot about triage. And getting started slowly. So we began first focusing on our leaders and equipping them with some feedback they needed to be more effective leaders of people. And that sort of set a foundation for performance and leadership feedback for all of our field leaders that were leading most of our employees in operations. And then we really began to focus on resolving pain points that our business leaders were experiencing, things like high turnover, having a shortage of talent that was available to them and ready to go. And so early on, we started investing in early career talent to help prop up and build our bench strength. And that involved hiring new and recent college graduates into a brand new academy that we called our Black and Gold Academy, a 1-year training program to really set the stage for their careers at Hertz. It was a sales and operations leadership development program. We started off with a dozen new college graduates, and fast forward to today, after we've gone through a lot of different scaling measures, we hire 300 to 400 per year every year, pretty consistently. The good news is that it's built our bench and it's allowed us to promote from within and get new sales reps up to productivity much faster and to retain them much longer.

▶3:42HostMark, can you share specific examples of how you've used people analytics to drive change and demonstrate HR's impact on business growth?

▶3:51GuestGrowth? Yeah, so the ability to demonstrate HR's impact is key, and that's how you get believers in what you're doing and you get commitment to it. So we established a talent analytics team that would be responsible for really understanding the landscape of our workforce and how our workforce was contributing to the company's growth. So a specific example would be we had really high turnover among our sales force. So turnover approaching 50%.. And when you think about your ability to grow as a company, that meant that our customers were getting 3 to 4 new sales reps each year. So it's very difficult to manage accounts and get your customers to stay committed to you, to retain them, and certainly to grow the business. And so we identified that, shined a spotlight on it first because it was a fact that wasn't well known, even though they knew they were experiencing the pain of higher turnover. But when you turn the data into insights, and let them see how it's impacting customer relationships, the ability for the company to grow, you really get their attention. And so we were hiring about 70% of our new sales reps off the street. That was also an insight that really wasn't known for the company overall. And we said, hey, we need to flip-flop that with internal mobility. And so over the last 3 years, we've done exactly that by building that early career bench that I told you about, by training them from within and then promoting and placing them. And now we actually fill 70% of our sales reps internally. And so the good news for the business is that those sales reps, because they're so well prepared and trained and all aligned around our common purpose as a company, they get to full sales productivity in half the time that a rep would if we hired them off the street, and we retain them twice as long.

▶5:34HostMark, what strategies have you found most effective in building and maintaining a talent pipeline that supports the business as it scales?

▶5:42GuestYeah, so I think the first thing you've got to really understand and align to is what is the company really trying to achieve. We were trying to get ourselves into hypergrowth mode to where we were attracting new customers and building business with our existing customers. It was that internal mobility piece, that strategy that enabled us to focus all of our resources on our own team members rather than constantly recruiting from the outside and having a hamster wheel of activity that really wasn't being productive for us. So for us, it was really acknowledging that we needed to build our own bench from within and then developing that talent pipeline to service from within rather than focusing exclusively on the external labor market.

▶6:23HostMark, how do you ensure that HR initiatives remain aligned with the company's core mission while avoiding creating separate agendas?

▶6:33GuestYeah, so I think, I think that it's important for HR to align to the company's overall purpose and the business goals. You've gotta be a business person first and foremost, and an HR leader second. So to me, that's paramount. That's something I've tried to do throughout my career, and I think it has served me well. You have to really dig in and understand how is the business measuring its success? What does success look like? For the business, and then translate what you know how to do from a talent perspective into something that's gonna help the business generate those results. So, it's really about equipping the business and helping the business develop the capabilities that's needed to deliver on its expected outcomes.

▶7:15HostMark, in your experience, what role does meritocracy and excellence play in creating a high-performing company culture?

▶7:23GuestYeah, so this is something that's really important to me. I think Creating a high-performance culture, one in which people are equipped with the tools, the resources, and the training they need to deliver high performance. I think you have to cultivate that culture first. That creates a very healthy internal competitive environment to where meritocracy can then flourish and it becomes the expected way of the company. And people begin to develop a set of shared expectations that it's through the results they're delivering meritocracy, that their careers will progress, whether that's making more money for a sales rep or whether it's progressing into more senior leadership roles. But I think high performance is a ticket to bigger and greater things, and that ultimately helps you create a meritocracy.

▶8:12HostMark, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶8:16GuestI think one thing I would share is we all work with, in the HR space, we work with managers, managers and leaders of people. And I think the piece of advice I would share with our listeners is don't try to make managers experts in HR or experts in talent or people and culture. I think instead, it's really about understanding the day in the life of a manager and what his and her pain points are and what they need to really advance their business objectives. And then figuring out how do you bring all the expertise and resources that HR has to bear on helping those managers solve those problems. I think all too often HR tries to make managers experts in what we do, and we want to see them get as smart at HR as we are, and it's just really not necessary, and it just gets in the way of what the managers are trying to achieve.

▶9:08HostMark, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶9:12GuestWell, it's my pleasure. Thank you very much.