Your personal Talent Relationship Manager aka Career Advisor

The primary goal of Zalando’s External Talent Community is to help great professionals find excellent career opportunities at Zalando. And we are really excited and pleased when we reach that goal.

Today, we are happy and proud to share yet another story about a member of our Talent Community who found a supremely interesting position at Zalando — with our help.

Here’s Balaji Santhanam, formerly a consultant in project management currently Senior Project Manager in Fulfilment Core, telling his story of success:

So, Balaji, let’s begin at the start: could you talk a bit about your professional background a bit?

My background is in Software Engineering and Computer Science, and I worked as a software engineer after getting my degree. However, at some point, I moved into a managerial role becoming a technical lead with responsibilities in project management. Since 2012, I have worked as a project manager, mainly as a consultant, working with a number of clients in various locations and traveling a lot outside of India. In 2015 I had an opportunity to move to Germany and soon I started working with Adidas, Trivago, more recently, Lufthansa.

That sounds great! A lot of travelling, projects with great companies… What motivated you to look for a job at Zalando?

For a long time, I have had interest in what we can call the “digital consumption ecosystem”. I am a huge fan of the platform concept — exactly what Zalando is creating by cultivating partnerships with various brands. First, I became interested in Zalando as a customer. I started shopping here shortly after I moved to Europe, and I had a top-notch experience with it. Safe to say, I was very aware of Zalando and hugely interested in it. During one of my consultancy projects with Adidas, I was required to work on a product that helped me to understand how its platform model works, how Zalando solves inventory issues and approaches customer experience.

And why did you decide to join our Talent Community?

I joined the External Talent Community at the beginning of 2020, as I started actively looking for new job opportunities. I liked the consistency in communication, and the part I appreciated the most was the personal call I was offered. I spoke with Mariam, a Talent Relationship Manager, who talked me through the possible opportunities with Zalando and explained to me the different requirements for different roles. This insight helped me get prepared for the application process. It also gave me a good understanding of how I would fit in the company, where my place in the team would be.

In what way were the expectations different?

When I worked as a project and program manager consultant, apart from the project execution and delivery, I needed to be quite knowledgeable about structuring budgets and administrative tasks. At Zalando, my projects require even more attention already during the initial phases, more scoping and prototyping.

Also, at Zalando we have a very strong focus on purpose — why was this role created? What is the ultimate goal behind your role? How can your success and performance be measured? In short, Zalando aims to connect the sense of purpose to the OKRs.

What do you do at Zalando now?

I am part of the Customer Fulfilment team within the department called “Fulfilment Core”. I am a Senior Project Manager and my responsibilities span planning, executing, overseeing various projects. I work on projects across departments, too, as this role was conceived as a cross-department one and involves working with various stakeholders.