The Future of Talent in Spotify’s Emerging Markets
At Spotify, we strongly believe in the value of our Early Career Programs (ECP) and the impact that the emerging talent workforce, Gen Z and beyond, can have on our business goals. Our People teams run several initiatives around this, including our flagship Summer Internship Program, and we have received great feedback from the teams, managers and of course from the early career talent too. As always, we lean on our learning on other markets however, when we set out to create an initiative around early careers in our emerging markets, especially for our South Asia, Middle East & Africa (SAMEA), and Japan, Asia Pacific (JAPAC) teams, we knew we had to take a different approach.
Emerging Markets – A Different Perspective
For Spotify, the SAMEA and JAPAC regions are high impact and high user growth markets. To be successful here, we understand that we must have a deep cultural understanding of the markets and customise our offerings as a part of our regionalisation strategy, while maintaining all the great things about our product that we offer customers globally.
Our HR processes and structures go hand in hand with the business needs and structure so we made the ECP program relevant to the regional teams based on the growth stage that they are in, as a business. The teams in JAPAC and SAMEA are leaner and also prioritise longer term business plans, campaigns and strategies that will make Spotify stronger in the region in the coming years. Hence, the Early Career Program for JAPAC & SAMEA needed to be a longer one and customised to these teams’ needs. Similar to our global programs, we also set out to ensure that the ideation and thought behind our approach has a fair share of representation of Gen Z ideas too.
The Program Design
Designing the program required collaboration between the Talent Acquisition, GreenHouse, HR partnerships and senior regional leads. First off, these teams aligned on priorities – it was clear that we needed the program to be immersive and hands-on. We also needed the participants to have an active say in market initiatives and we wanted the participants to see projects and initiatives through to the end. Just as this is important for us, it needed to be meaningful for the participants too. We designed the program in a way that the new talents would get deeper learning, higher involvement, hands-on experience and ownership of their work, as well as getting to experience Spotify’s culture and be a part of the team’s journey in these emerging markets.
Based on these principles, we set out with our pilot regional ECP in SAMEA – we identified 4 roles across our Mumbai, Dubai and Johannesburg locations and created an 18 month roadmap for these individuals. Their journey was designed in a way that meant they could work with senior leads on meaningful initiatives where their unique perspectives helped have a deeper impact. The idea was not to have interns for short periods doing grunt work, but instead employ talent on a longer term basis, and embed them into the business so that they could contribute meaningfully and also learn in the process. This also meant that unlike other programs where we may hire from colleges, these would be people in early stages of their working careers, potentially having previously worked at a job for 2 years or less.
The Story So Far
Based on the SAMEA pilot, we then introduced a tweaked version of this program to Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia.The tweaks included changing the tenure to 24 months instead of 18 in these markets, based on the business plans for certain assignments. The framework that we’ve created allows us to be able to replicate this program across all our emerging markets wherever needed..
Now, with some of the participants having spent some time with the teams, we are starting to receive early signs of success, impact and engagement. We now have 10 early career program hires who are doing some really interesting work like working on new market launch campaigns, live events and experiential marketing initiatives in these regions. We’ve also made sure that all our ECP participants go through a structured learning path, and get to know as much as possible about Spotify, our culture and our values. We have also assigned them mentors and staying true to our value of being Playful, their program also involves some fun interventions!
Looking Forward
While it’s still early days for this program, we’ve seen indications that it’s working quite well. We already experience keen interest from managers about the next ECP, as they have witnessed the current participants having meaningful business impact.
Another aspect of this program is to build a strong pipeline of talent to hire into permanent roles. This aligns really well with our Internal Mobility philosophy where we’re proactively working to provide more growth opportunities to existing Spotifiers and promote from within. With a program like this, we have a set of talented individuals who are already considered Spotifiers as they know our approach and philosophy.
As we roll out this framework to other emerging markets at Spotify we will continue to fine tune each iteration, making it sharper and more relevant to the markets we are working within.
