Marija, Specialist HR Digital Solutions in Vilsbiburg, Germany has been working at DRÄXLMAIER since 2017
A DRÄXLMAIER Journey
Do you remember your feeling when you started at DRÄXLMAIER?
The feeling was anxiety. DRÄXLMAIER was my first corporate job. Prior to joining DRÄXLMAIER, I was an English teacher in Serbia. This was all I wanted to do, ever since I was a child, and I worked as a teacher for about five years, with students from three to 70 years old, at all levels. I loved the job, but with teaching you don’t have a lot of opportunities. You do the same job, amazing as it is, at the beginning of your career and at the end.
In 2017, I got a “sign from above” when four friends sent me the link for the job posting at DRÄXLMAIER on the same day. For me, the opportunity to work for a German company was synonymous with stability. So, I took the interview, had a great candidate experience and soon started working in the Personnel Development team of the HR department in our plant in Zrenjanin. And quickly, it became more than stability. It became opportunity. The moment I stepped into DRÄXLMAIER, the entire universe of possibilities opened up.
How did you reach your current job position in HR?
When I started at DRÄXLMAIER in 2017 the plant in Zrenjanin was growing incredibly fast. The HR team wasn't big enough to cover all the needs. So I started helping out and getting involved with the recruiting. Then there were plans to open a research and development center for engineers in Belgrade. At that moment, we no longer had any additional capacity in the HR team. I was the only one that could potentially handle a little bit more. So the HR manager approached me if I could just shortly help out with the colleagues from Germany. I said yes and it turned into more and more until I became the main contact in Serbia for the opening of that location.
After about a year of handling the double role of Senior Personal Development Officer in Zrenjanin and HR topics for Belgrade, I moved to Belgrade to take over the HR Generalist position full time. In the meantime, I developed a really cool relationship with the German colleagues who were initially involved in the project and they invited me to join the team here at the headquarter.
I was supposed to move in the beginning of April 2020. I had my bags packed and was ready to be picked up by the driver to go to the airport when I got the news that Corona regulations are now in effect, the borders are closing and that all trips are stopped. So my moving to Germany got postponed by one year. And I think it was actually good for me to have that year because it gave me some more perspective and a really long onboarding phase into the role of the Global Process Expert for recruiting and Global Key User SuccessFactors Recruiting.
In my first week here, I was already leading a global project. My experience with the HR team in Serbia gave me the best possible foundation. The HR manager there, my first manager in the company, taught me the main principles I follow today - how to have the customer perspective and how to really think about the value I am bringing to the organization. And my new manager in Germany gave me the space and the trust to grow into my role and turn it into something more that it was initially.
How would you describe your job now?
I just started a new position as Specialist for HR Digital Solutions. My main responsibility is to support the digitalization of HR, while keeping the focus on customer experience, end-to-end process perspective, potential for standardization and synergies with our existing HR IT landscape. I basically collect and review the HR IT needs from around the world and find out how to meet those needs when it comes to digital solutions. Let's say I´m a translator between the business needs and the IT requirements, because this is where the break usually happens. I've become a little bit of a tech nerd in the last couple of years so I think this is going to be so much fun.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
That I get to learn something new almost every day. It keeps my mind engaged. Some days I would love some repetitive work for a week or two where I can just do something I´m 100 percent familiar and confident with. But I would miss the possibility to figure out something new and to solve a problem. This is what I really enjoy at work.
Right now, among other things, I am responsible to drive two critical projects in HR that will affect the experience of every single employee in the company. So over 70,000 employees around the world will interact with these systems. It's such a huge topic considering the process side of things, the people dimension, the technology, how it's going to be configured, how it's going to fit into the existing HR IT landscape. So every day I find out something new about how things should or shouldn't be done.
Do you have any hobbies, personal commitment, passions and talents you would like to tell us about?
Ever since I was a kid I was a really big book lover! When I need to relax and depressurize, I pick up a book. They're like great friends.
If I could recommend a book for everybody in the business world it would be “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. It describes how different cultures behave in business environments and it helped me a lot with my move to Germany. I come from a very passionate and hierarchical culture. It means we're outspoken, but we're not necessarily outspoken to our managers. When I moved to Germany, it took me a while to understand why some of my behavior was interpreted a certain way, and also the fact that I perceive certain behavior of my colleagues in a different way than what they think they are communicating. The book made me understand how different cultures give feedback or put forward ideas and how management styles are different in different cultures.
