Interview with Drs Rolf Bezemer

Lumesse, formerly known as StepStone Solutions, one of the world's leading talent management companies recently underwent a rebranding to reflect their company's new direction and strategies in the realm of talent management.

With the launch of their new book “Who Moved My Talent” we managed to get a hold of Lumesse's Managing Director for Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, Drs Rolf Bezemer. to give us some insight on the company's new direction and strategy as well as their new book.

Who Moved My Talent by HR guru Peter Gold is a lighthearted but pointed look at the why, what and how of finding, connecting and engaging the people that will transform your business.

MAXIT: What originally prompted the name change from StepStone to Lumesse?

Rolf: Haha, the first killer question. Well, for a very long time StepStone Solutions have been a subsidiary of a bigger group called StepStone, a very successful company in every single country in Europe and as part of that, StepStone Solutions started off in 2003 to grow. Last year we have separated from our parent company, but we are still the same people and the same company, though we are now on our own feet with our own brand and identity. We want to be connected more to the marketspace and the development and the field of telemanagement with more inspiring brands in the European market where we have a good presence and both StepStone and Lumesse are very successful.

MAXIT: So how have things been faring since the change?

Rolf: So far we've gotten a lot of attraction because part of a rebrand is about getting a new identity in terms of having company values and a line, the branding and the tone of voice more with the software that we provide. Back in the old days, IT and software were very technical, very difficult.
We hope to deliver software which is far more appealing and inspiring people's careers and get to the human potential where it should be, enabling our customers in finding people and in sourcing them in order to have the best potential out of the people that work for these companies.

Years ago, HR was a very transactional thing, meaning you have to pay people, you need to flag them as an employer or you need to link them to a business unit or you link them to the strategy that you have and with the re brand but also with the messaging around the new identity. We try to get it the other way around, meaning that it's very important to have an over arching telemanagement strategy but also it's to people within your business that drive this strategy and that should be part of it. So, the business strategy going forward will include that message. We consider ourselves to be the only global company that makes telemanagement work locally, implicating that in each of the countries, regardless whether it is the UK, where the headquarters is, or Hong Kong or Singapore but also in Malaysia, we will have our own identity with our own software and business strategy to align with particular things of the country

MAXIT: You also recently launched a book, titled “Who Moved My Talent”

Rolf: Who Moved My Talent is a very simplistic book on telemanagement and talent and it comes from a well-known book called 'Who Moved My Cheese?' about a group of mice looking for the best cheese to eat.

So, this is sort of the parallel that we take so, the book is written with a very famous HR telemanagement guru from the UK.

It is a story about a group of people that have been working for a company for a very long time that make different decisions in their lives and it sees how they are being treated by the organisation and how the grow plans of the organisation affect the way they work their jobs.

So, from a branding and candidate's perspective, organisation pay more and more attention to the labour market. Looking at us, and how did they perceive us as an employer and how as an organisation are we able to communicate with this new group, about what we do and how our people work with us and how are they having fun while working for us and what kind of career development is being offered beyond the scope of the job that you are doing.

That all comes to sort of a story in the Who Moved My Talent, which in the end gives sort of a blink to organisations saying, well, are you still aware on how you run your business and how you run your people and do you know exactly which people you find good and want to keep on or where can you find the best people in the market. The book gives a lot of touching points for organisations, saying, this not what we are doing not very well, here's some insight on it.

MAXIT: So, do you see this book making a change, maybe in South East Asia?

Rolf: This book will be very useful for a lot of local companies here, I know because I've had the pleasure of working in Malaysia for the past 18 months, with a lot of discussions about talents, people, skilling and growing, and I'm pleased to see this although not everything is yet in place.

Four out of five companies we've talked to are very keen to make the change because they are aware of what they lack and are very interested in exploring how their organazation can improve to be more people oriented rather than product oriented.

So, this book, it gives a very light overview for organisations where they can see, sort of throughout the storyline, things happening that also happen in their organisation. In terms of being ready for the future, in terms of having people on the right track, making the right decisions about people.

MAXIT: Thanks for your time Rolf, anything you would like to add for our readers?

Rolf: You should read through the book, it costs you just one hour but you will see a lot of nice ways of looking at people and work and what is motivating people to work.