Human Capital: What is your professional background?

Fiona Cole: I'm a bit unconventional in my background. I did some different things before I moved to HR. I come from a TV background - I spent five years in tv, working with SBS and moving around various production departments there, but not in HR. I then moved into HR and spent some time at Vodafone setting up their greenfields site in Tasmania, a 600 seat call centre.

I was very lucky here at Yahoo!7. I've been here almost five years. It's been quite a fortunate fit because of what we do here - the media mixes we have - and my background.

HC: What drew you to an HR role?

FC: It's been an interesting journey because what I've gone through my background has fitted in well with what I've achieved here. For example, with the greenfields site with Vodafone, that was a massive recruitment activity. It was when telcos had taken off through the 1990s. We're experiencing very much the same growth here at Yahoo7. When I started we were 200 people, now we're 400 people. We've had two acquisitions - Total Travel and Spreets. The growth has been extraordinary. It's very exciting for people here, but also I'm quite used to that fast pace. It's very vibrant organisation and industry we're in, and it's important we change and adapt with that.

HC: What qualifications do you hold?

FC: I've done a couple of HR diplomas, a project management diploma and a Masters of Management with UTS - so a bit of a mix. I'm a huge advocate of education and life learning so I've made that a priority both for myself and here at Yahoo!7.

HC: How do you build a learning culture at Yahoo!7?
FC: I've done many different roles in my previous jobs; I moved around a lot. I saw the benefit of that for me, and we do a lot of that here. We actively move people around roles in the organisation, and that not only keeps people engaged and stimulated, it also retains them. We're very strong on identifying key talent. For example, one person in my team was bought in as an HR person but his background is in product, and he has an environmental degree. It was perfect for what I needed in my team. He did a short HR course and he's got the maturity to handle what we give him. It builds a lovely diversity into that mix. Yes, it's a big learning curve but the value of that has been fantastic. HR is very visible so other people see that, and think, 'that's great, I wonder what else I could do?'

HC: Yahoo!7 has acquired two companies - Spreets and Total Travel. What have you done to encourage collaboration and innovation in the culture?

FC: To me the diversity aspect is what makes us what we are and that's important to the way in which Yahoo operates. We have different people from different backgrounds and views - and that helps us with creativity and innovation and how we approach things.

As an example of how we use this diversity, we have what we call hack days. It's a competition pitching team against team. Teams are given 24 hours to create whatever they want, to do whatever they want, to create something practical at the end of it. People will hack together, so teams of engineers, product people, marketing people, sales people. We have a judging panel - usually the exec team - and people are given an opportunity to present their hack. The hack can go on to be something we implement in the company. For the last hack day we had, because we've got a lot of new people and they get confused about which meeting room is which, and where they are in the building, one group created a hack which showed in an interactive format where each room was and what was in each room so it could be integrated into our intranet.

HC: Can you tell me a bit about some of Yahoo's more 'out of the box' employee perks?

FC: One of the more unusual is bad hair day. One day a year is given to everyone where if you have a bad hair day or have something else to do, you take the day off. People love it. We do fun things like hamburger eating competitions - just because we can. Our CEO believed he could beat anyone eating McDonald's hamburger. He really enjoys eating those burgers. So we decided to put him to the test. It was how many seconds you need to eat a burger. He's quick - his best time was eight seconds. One person did actually beat him at seven seconds and they won the purple cape - it's an honorary position to be in. A bit of fun!

We have a speaker series, so we organise a professional speaker to come in. We've had some fairly big names: comedian Anh Do; Steven Bradbury, the first Australian to win a Winter Olympic gold medal; Li Cunxin, who inspired the film Mao's Last Dancer; Bernard Salt, the demographer.

They present to the company, it's filmed and we make it an event. We want people to experience something new, take a couple of hours out of the day, hear these amazing stories. It gets people completely out of their zone, gets them thinking about something new.

HC: What do you think it takes to succeed in HR?
FC: Generally I think what it takes to succeed is not be an HR person. It's controversial but you need the business understanding, to have experienced that before getting into that space, or at least throughout that career, to really understand how to be an HR person and to add value. If you can't add value as an HR person, if you don't understand the commercials of the business, if you don't know how the business is operating, you will struggle. I see that with people we employ - we try to employ people with a bit of diversity of background, because that brings with it knowledge that is outside of the online industry.

HC: What advice would you give to graduates considering a career in HR?
FC: Don't study HR! Do something else and then come into it. Or study psych or pure HR but make sure you also get some sort of business experience - whatever that might be - because I don't think HR will add enough value if they have not experienced the real world. That's a criticism of the role - HR doesn't understand the business and they don't have that commercial nous, which in many cases is probably true. So what I say is, go get it.

HC: Do you have any role models professionally or personally?

FC: I know people do have role models and I respect that, but for me there's no one person I would call a role model. I like to take snippets out of people. Rather than, 'there's a person, I'll copy them'. That's too narrow. I admire lots of different people for lots of different reasons, and there are aspects of those people that are intriguing to me, but no one I can say, 'I want to be like them'.

HC: What's the biggest HR challenge the company faces and how do you plan to overcome that?
FC: As with lots of companies the talent shortage is always an issue. It will only become more of an issue. For us, as different organisations in the world catch onto the online environment, they are taking a lot of our great talent into, but they are also growing that talent. Online has only been around for 10-12 years so it's an undeveloped, very young industry. There are only a small number of people who have any experience. How long can you say someone has had experience? You can't say 20 years. You could say 10 years, max; you're a veteran at 10 years. As companies develop more online, the number of people with that experience will grow, so that will make it easier. But for the moment there is a talent shortage.
HC: Where do you see the future of HR as a profession heading?

FC: I think HR is going to stay on the executive team. That will only become more important as we do have talent shortage. The management and actual organisation of that talent, and getting that talent onboard, will only become harder and harder. That is a critical path for HR, to make sure they are at the forefront of managing that and driving it through the business.