Market View

Adaptive HR in a Dynamic World: Navigating Diversity, Jurisdiction, and the Modern Workforce

Interview with

Dror Yaacobi

VP Global HR & Organisational Development, SimilarWeb

About Dror Yaacobi

Dror Yaacobi is the Vice President of Organisational Development and Global Human Resources at SimilarWeb. In this role, he oversees all organisational development activities including employee onboarding, manager onboarding, implementing people processes, leadership development, talent development, people analytics, and more. As the VP of Global HR, Dror supports SimilarWeb's global operations by partnering with leaders across the company's worldwide offices in Tokyo, the US, Israel, and Europe. His responsibilities span HR operational development and strategy across the global organisation.

How does your organisation navigate the complexities of operating under multiple jurisdictions with varying localisation requirements and business practices?

When we started we were a small startup, less than 300 employees, and we were very Israel-centric. We had a few employees in the US and Europe, but most employees were based in Israel.

As we grew, our strategy was to try to imitate the culture we had at our headquarters. It was very much not thinking about localisation, a very SimilarWeb Israeli company-centric mindset. But as we grow, for example now we have London as our EMEA headquarters, Munich, Kiev, Paris - different EMEA offices, now EMEA has its own culture and identity, which is part of the SimilarWeb brand.

It's about thinking - what are the corporate values we believe in? But we need to double down and think - what does it mean to us? If for example one of our values is being practical, we all need to think about what that means to us in EMEA. This is how we balance globalisation and localisation.

At the beginning it was very much globalisation, making sure the SimilarWeb DNA was present, had a strong foundation in each region. Once there was a strong foundation, then we could start creating more local culture that resonates with employees from those regions.

In what ways does your organisation address the challenges posed by a diverse and decentralised workforce?

As we have expanded globally at a rapid pace, nurturing a connected culture across regions with employees from greatly diverse backgrounds has certainly posed challenges.

For example, recently we launched a new talent analytics dashboard, bringing together data from various sources like performance assessments, risk assessments, internal mobility stats, and attrition drivers. As a data company, we have access to a wealth of talent data. But a common challenge is translating that into meaningful insights that lead to action. Managers often find large amounts of data difficult to digest and know what it means for decisions.

So what I did was think carefully about the types of business and talent questions leaders should be asking themselves, that our data can help answer. Things like key gaps or risks to address, or actions to consider based on trends. Rather than just present data, I wanted to enable them to extract value.

How would you rate the adaptability and flexibility of your current HR platform solution or HCM?

The main principle in choosing the new HRIS to replace the old one was that it needed to be almost fully flexible, to allow us to design processes to our needs. As someone in organisational development designing people processes, I dislike being required to adopt the ‘best practices’ prescribed by the HR solution. The system must be able to adapt to our business needs, not the other way around. I redesigned our onboarding completely to be unique and relevant to our specific needs.

When you choose a highly customisable system, you can bring together the data points needed to extract data driven insights. Let me share an example. A key question we were able to answer is what are the top three reasons for resignation or voluntary turnover at our company. To power this, we leverage exit interviews with departing employees and map it to the reasons for leaving.

Another example we were able to answer is how many people were rated as ‘developing’ in their performance assessments but have now moved up the ‘contributing’ level in the latest assessment. If an employee was rated as ‘developing’ a year ago and is again rated the same, it indicates that after a year they are not able to contribute at the level expected, which tells us that there is an issue needing attention.

An adaptable HR Solution is crucial to design the processes to fit our needs and to derive the people insights that are important to our business. Ultimately this supports managers in making data driven workforce decisions.

How do you ensure your HR platform remains flexible and adaptive to your business' changing needs?

I want to differentiate between flexible and customisable. Needing to change your HRIS for any organisational change means it's not scalable. Yes, flexibility is important. But when designing your HRIS, don't only consider current needs - think future needs too. Redesigning after each company stage will prevent you from focusing on what matters - supporting managers and people.

Yes, HRIS flexibility is important - design it for future needs, not just current needs, to scale effectively. We try to build in flexibility from the start, utilising my experience and expertise in organisational development and change management to forecast what our needs will be down the line.

We also make sure to continually gather feedback from end users and other stakeholders to understand evolving needs and pain points. Often it's the employees and managers actually using the platforms day-to-day that surface new requirements or desired capabilities. Getting their input is critical.

Additionally, we work very closely with our technology teams. They keep us up-to-date on innovations that can enhance our HR systems and processes. By partnering cross-functionally, and not operating in a silo, we can ensure our HR platform evolves with the business.

So how do you describe your organisation's approach to data and system integration? Do you have a single unified system of record or allow multiple systems?

First, data is part of our DNA as a data company. If you don't speak the language of data, you can't speak to anyone here - it's our core language. We're very data driven. For HR systems, we have different ones but our HRIS collects data from them into one place - we have one system to view HR data from multiple sources. We have multiple systems but one single source of truth for data.

Having a unified data source is crucial for enabling robust analytics and reporting. Data fragmentation severely limits the insights HR can provide to the business. By centralising data from various systems into our HRIS, we gain access to a holistic data set. Our analytics team can then slice and dice the data however needed to surface valuable workforce insights.

We also use APIs and direct integrations between our HRIS and other platforms like our ATS to keep the data flows constant and automated. This ensures our analytics are up-to-date and comprehensive. Having a unified dataset provides a strategic advantage for HR to become a true data-driven consultant and guide for the business.

One last thought is that the ultimate end user for HR systems and data should be leaders and managers in the business, not HR. We need to understand their experience and perspectives first and foremost.

About SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a leading digital intelligence company founded in 2009. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, it provides insights about website traffic, app usage, and digital consumer behaviour. SimilarWeb's platform uses machine learning and behavioural analysis to offer visibility into the digital ecosystem. The company serves over 2000 global enterprise customers across industries like retail, finance, and technology. SimilarWeb aims to democratise access to digital insights to help businesses win online.