How To Recruit Talent For Innovation – Insights From An Electric Vehicle Veteran

What Sue Ozdemir learned growing up taking apart electric motors in her dad’s auto repair shop has been steering her career ever since, both in small businesses and at GE. Little did she know how much of a head start those childhood bonding moments with her dad would give her in the burgeoning electric vehicle industry. As a girl in the male-dominated automotive sector, no less.

She spent about eight years at General Electric as CEO & CCO of their Small Industrial Motors Division, eventually growing it into a 160 million enterprise. Today, Ozdemir is the CEO of Exro Technologies, a publicly-traded company that innovates and manufactures key components for electric vehicles. She has literally spent her entire 30 year career (and counting) in EV innovation.

We need innovation on an industrial scale – But big industry is struggling to do it

As the global economy pivots to net zero, it’s birthing a host of completely new industries. From the shirts on our backs, to where and how we shop and dine, to the vehicles we drive (or ride in), to the homes we live in and beyond, every aspect of the economy is changing. Without always knowing what the new raw materials will be or where they’ll come from, or what they’ll cost, companies have to pivot their operations and business models to accommodate the net zero economy, all while keeping their current business going strong.

They can’t hide all their struggles either, because now the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing to require that companies report their financial risks from climate change, how they plan to mitigate it, how they plan to transition to net zero, and the risks from that transition. It’s, well, complicated.

One of the key things that Ozdemir told me on my Electric Ladies Podcast recently that she learned at GE is, why corporate America struggles to innovate: “We just have to be able to challenge that status quo. We have to be willing to think that maybe we tried this 15 years ago and it didn't work, but now there's so much new innovation in the market,” that maybe it can work now. “And I think challenging that status quo is pretty difficult” in big corporations.

“Disciplined Innovation”

Ozdemir said that Exro’s approach is what they call “disciplined Innovation,” which may sound like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. At the heart of it is challenging the status quo, exactly the opposite of the corporate approach, which she described as “not invented here that I see throughout the legacy automotive” industry.

“We (at Exro) actually have a core value. We call it disciplined innovation. So, innovation that leads to execution is our goal. It's a lot of fun to be able to spitball together, different ideas that we think will change and make a more sustainable future,” she explained. But then you have to get practical. “Then to kind of boil that down and say, ‘What makes a great business model? What also helps real people in the real world like us? What would we want to do? How would we want to drive it? What would we want to see for our families?”

She said they, “definitely have a real innovation sandbox stage; there’s really no rules, no process, no regulation in that stage. We develop because we are smart as a team and we're in the world and we're real and we're seeing what's around us.”

She emphasized keeping it “in the real world” repeatedly, pointing out that the market for EVs is much broader than those who can afford to pay what current models cost, for example. “ We try to kind of live in reality and innovate around what we think will make real solutions for real problems,” she said adding, ”What we really do is think about, ‘can we really take this to production?’”

It's all about the talent – “the right people, not the right roles”

Which means it’s all about who is at the table and whether they, as Jim Collins wrote in the seminal business strategy book, “Good to Great,” have the right people in the right seat on the right bus.

“Our philosophy, our main pH for hiring has been and continues to serve us very well,” Ozdemir explained, “we hire the right people, not the right roles.” They even call people back for other roles. “We've had a number of situations where somebody has interviewed, we've had multiple good candidates, taken one for the role and then called the other candidates back and said, ‘Hey, this role was filled, but we've got role B, C, D. Do you want to start there?’ And, it's worked really, really well for us.”

They are working around the massive shifts in recruitment and workplace habits due to or triggered by the pandemic. “I think the whole world has changed over the last two years when it comes to recruitment. We definitely see it,” she told me.

Except at Exro, people “want to get back in the office.”

It’s a cultural adjustment

It requires a cultural adjustment for people who come from the corporate world to a small company of about 100 people like Exro. “I think there's two different mindsets,” she explained. “People that are coming into a company like ours are kind of coming in with that attitude of some chaos, some uncertainty, some could change plans as we go,” versus the stability and typical career patterns in a big corporation.

Another key element of their innovation-focused culture is that they have a diverse, multi-generational team. Though she said their average employee age is likely in the 30’s, “we have a lot of people that have been in the industry a long time that are kind of coaching them up,” sharing their knowledge and learning new things at the same time.

It’s about being open to collaborate and learn from each other.