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GLOBAL TRAVELLER After studying industrial relations at McGill and working with some of the most innovative global companies around, including GE and UBS, this HR professional has found himself playing a key role at one of the best-connected companies in the world: LinkedIn. Yasu Sato talks to HRD Just over two years ago, Yasu Sato was looking for a fresh challenge and a change in career direction. He did what just about every professional does these days: he logged onto his LinkedIn profile. On his homepage a job ad caught his attention. “I clicked on it and looked at the description. I literally fell off the chair – I thought, wow, this is really me,” he recalls. The targeted, specific ad created the momentum that led to him joining LinkedIn. It also provided a valuable lesson for Sato about the value of data. “Later on I learned this is the power of data insights – there are algorithms built behind these advertisements that provide relevant information to the right party, to the right candidate. I felt it was personalized to me. It was another turning point, and told me that we – as HR professionals – need to be attuned to data and what it can bring to business.”
ROAD TO HR Sato’s first inkling of a career in HR came about in high school. After spending his formative years in Japan, his high school offered a one-year exchange program to the US. The father in the American family he stayed with had the misfortune of losing his job. Talking about possible careers with him one day, Sato expressed, understandably at that age, some uncertainty for his own future path. It was suggested he should consider HR; being multi-disciplinary, the host father mentioned, it contains elements from a
broad range of specialist areas – from L&D to compensation and benefits to talent acquisition. “At the age of 16, to have that kind of message from somebody who had gone through the tough experience of being laid off – that stuck in my mind for a long time. When I went to university in Canada I decided to major in industrial/labour management relations. That’s how my introduction to the HR world came about,” Sato says. He completed a BA in Industrial Relations at Montreal’s McGill University, setting him up for a varied and impressive international career.
A GLOBAL CAREER Skip forward a few years, and Sato can list on his CV HR roles at General Electric (GE) and GE Capital, as well as UBS. He holds a Certified Six Sigma Green Belt from GE and is truly the definition of a global professional, with work experience in Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Thailand and US; and projects in Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Philippines, Poland and Thailand. Sato says he’s taken best practice elements from each workplace and each project on which he’s worked, especially from GE. He says the learning opportunities were everywhere in the company, and this, in turn, laid the foundations for his career as an HR professional. “I directly benefitted from the leadership and management philosophy that emerged from GE,” he
WHAT’S BEEN THE BIGGEST HR CONCERN REGARDING LINKEDIN’S RAPID GROWTH?
“It’s probably not a concern as such, but more an opportunity, and that is to ensure we maintain a high quality of hiring. That’s critical. Without that raw material, or if you get the wrong type of raw material, it’s difficult to change. If you get it right, it’s one of the strongest assets any company can have.”
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