S1E17 - An Astrophysicist Reaches for the Stars in Talent Acquisition

Episode Notes

Growing up a “Star Trek” fan, Ajay Patel marveled at boldly going where no one had gone before. It was only natural he would study astrophysics at university, but instead of building rockets and studying celestial bodies, his career pivoted to HR where he builds talent pipelines.

The figure-it-out mindset of an engineer came in handy when he arrived at Straumann Group in 2020 as vice president of talent acquisition. Though the Swiss dental equipment maker is more than 70 years old, the environment and culture felt decidedly like a startup. TA was a blank slate, with little in the way of established processes.

In this episode of “Unusual Attitudes,” Patel traces the excitement he felt building a function from scratch to keep pace with a rapidly growing enterprise.