Case study / 01
Global Lead, Talent Acquisition
2022 – 2025
ZALANDO
An AI organization from zero to 120 people in six months
Built a pan-European AI organization from zero to 120 people across four countries, led a 22-person talent team across Europe and China, and improved hiring speed and offer acceptance.
- AI organization in six months
- 0 → 120
- Time to Hire
- −32%
- Offer acceptance
- +21%
- Interviewers trained
- 1,000+
01 · The mandate
Europe's leading fashion platform was making its big bet on AI. It needed an entire cross-functional AI organization — research, ML engineering, product — built from nothing, at speed, across markets it hadn't hired in before.
02 · What I built and led
I led talent acquisition globally across AI and machine learning, Research, Technology, Commercial, Product, Design and corporate functions — a team of 22 across Europe and China.
The AI build-out went from zero to 120 people in six months across Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Finland. Under the organization’s internal reporting definition, 42% were diversity hires. The work included market entry, executive search for the leadership team, and standing up a Technology and AI hub in Shenzhen.
Beyond the build-out: launched AI/ML and Research early-careers programs and an Associate PM MBA program, and built an interviewer training system grounded in hiring data and neuroscience — over 1,000 interviewers trained.
The system-level results: Time to Hire down 32%, final-stage-to-hire conversion up 16%, offer acceptance up 21%. Rated in Zalando's top performance tier (~3% of the org).
How it worked
Reconstructed operating model
A talent system built around the organization—not a list of vacancies.
The build linked capability planning, market entry, leadership search, talent pipelines and interviewer quality into one operating loop across four countries.
- 01Team
Capability map
Translate the AI strategy into leadership, research, engineering and product capabilities.
- 02Human judgment
Market entry
Design a hiring approach for Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Finland.
- 03Operating system
Talent engine
Build repeatable pipelines and executive search around the capability plan.
- 04Operating system
Quality loop
Train 1,000+ interviewers and use conversion data to improve the process.
- 05Team
AI organization
Build the leadership team and 120-person cross-functional organization in six months.
03 · Tradeoffs and judgment
The choices that shaped the system.
- 01
Build the leadership team first
Executive search and capability planning set the shape of the organization before volume hiring accelerated.
- 02
Treat each market as a product
The four-country build needed local entry strategies connected to one global operating model—not a copied sourcing playbook.
- 03
Fix conversion, not just volume
Interviewer training and funnel measurement made quality and speed part of the same system.
04 · What changed
Scale and speed at the executive level: building an entire AI organization, not filling roles.
Evidence note · Metrics are drawn from the operating record for this work. The diagram is a confidentiality-safe reconstruction, not an internal Zalando artifact; selected references and supporting context are available privately.