Embedding Cultural Awareness to Strengthen Global Hiring Alexandre Corbin, Tabby

Cultural context can make or break your ability to close top talent across regions.

Alexandre Corbin, Head of Talent Acquisition at Tabby, joins Shannon Ogborn to share how his team adapted recruiting strategies to local norms while scaling one of the Middle East’s fastest-growing fintech companies. From launching operations in Egypt to navigating hiring compliance in Saudi Arabia, he explains what changes when you hire with cultural awareness.

Alexandre shares how hiring local recruiters, shifting communication styles, and focusing on face-to-face interaction improved pass-through rates and candidate experience in high-volume markets. By combining context-aware data with empathy, his team rebuilt trust and engagement across three regions.

Key takeaways:

• Local context changes candidate behavior: Small missteps can derail high-volume hiring in new regions
• Trust begins with proximity: In-person recruiting shifts perceptions faster than online touchpoints
• Data reveals gaps, not reasons: You need cultural fluency to understand what metrics miss

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:33) Meet Alexandre Corbin

(01:46) How culture shapes every part of hiring

(04:12) Why Tabby hired local recruiters early

(07:58) Understanding employer reputation in the market

(08:53) Rebuilding trust and employer brand in new markets

(11:27) What changes and what stays the same

(13:47) Adapting interviews for cultural expectations

(16:44) Using cNPS scores to shape strategy

(19:58) What funnel data reveals about cultural mismatch

(22:56) The results of changing the candidate journey

Transcript

Alexandre Corbin (00:00):

So for me, hiring excellence is when you've got the combination of quality, speed, and experience. So it's not just about filling roles as fast as you can because we can, I mean, if it's just hiring someone randomly, it's fairly easy, but it's about getting to this point where you can actually make those great hiring decisions in a consistent way, which actually allows the business to move forward.

Shannon Ogborn (00:33):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting-edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am so excited to have our first guest from a Middle East company. Alex Corbin is the head of TA at Tabby, the Middle East's leading FinTech and one of the region's fastest growing unicorns. He's played a key role in Tabby's hypergrowth journey from launching Egypt's operations to expanding across KSA while really redefining how modern data-driven recruiting works in high-growth companies. He's passionate about building world-class teams and pushing the boundaries of TA. He combines data, technology, and empathy to make hiring faster, smarter, and more human. Alex, thank you so much for joining us.

Alexandre Corbin (01:45):

Thank you for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (01:46):

It's safe to say that Tabby's growth is kind of on fire and you hire in so many different regions. I am excited to hear more about how Tabby has gotten tactically into influencing this area. But first want to start with a little bit of context of why cultures influence on hiring matters so much, especially as we keep moving towards this global workforce.

Alexandre Corbin (02:19):

Yes, so as you just mentioned, Tabby does hiring in many different countries as well as many different regions. So we're hiring a lot of talented in Europe as well as the Middle East, mainly the UAE, Saudi Arabia. But we also have a fairly big shared service in Egypt. And as you can imagine this means we work with a lot of different cultures and one of the biggest differences within those cultures is actually the communication style, which we have to tackle in many different ways.

Shannon Ogborn (02:55):

And it's not even just about language barrier or language itself, it's communication. How does that vary between countries?

Alexandre Corbin (03:08):

The main thing is obviously in recruitment is everything starts with the connection you can build with candidates and this relationship which you build throughout the process, which is key as any recruiter knows in order to close those candidates down the line. And there's ways of building those relationships depending on the regions where you are, right? Even within Europe, lots of countries in Europe, different styles. We've got a very big Russian community where it's a bit harder to build this relationship with them, and this relationship builds within time in Egypt. Very emotional candidates or emotional communication as a whole. I would say we get a lot of pushbacks when it comes to feedback. So this is also something we need to be careful. And then we've got the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia where we see that face-to-face interaction is really where you build this connection with candidates. So we have to tackle those markets in very different ways.

Shannon Ogborn (04:12):

And I think there's quite a bit to lose. If you don't do this in the right way, you're not setting yourself up for success. And I know one of the things that Tabby did from this perspective was hiring locally to build that credibility and understanding. Can you walk me through a little bit of why you did it, how you did it, and just what impact that has had on the hiring at Tabby.

Alexandre Corbin (04:42):

We hire once again across many different regions for many different divisions. What we try to do is have local talent who actually understands the local talent. We've got remote talent as well as local talent. So our remote talent is mainly engineering talent and we've got a very diversified talent acquisition team there. And each of them can actually tap into a very different talent. As mentioned previously, we've got a very big Russian community for any recruiter that has worked with Russians, and this is what I meant by it takes time to build this relationship with Russians because they tend to be a bit more on the defense, first of all, as in, is this actually true? Is this a reputable company? And this is something that very easily a recruiter that does not necessarily understand this culture might miss and be like, well, that guy is very cold.

(05:45):

Is he actually going to be a cultural fit? Maybe not. So I might reject him. Another big thing is when we actually started to build this shared service in Egypt, we did not have any Egyptian recruiters. So it was actually done by the team based in the UAE, very heavily supported by this remote engineering team as well. So tech recruiters, and we did not really know how to properly tackle. And the talent is very, very different. And this is where we've made a few mistakes in terms of how we were selling the opportunity, how the talent was also expected to be reassured. So just to give a bit more of historical context, Tabby exited the market. That was four months before we started the shared service. So we did launch the product for many reasons. We had to exit the market. And so the market already had this idea of, well, Tabby was there and Tabby left and Tabby might leave again.

(06:51):

And this is where we already failed to reassure them that, Hey, don't worry, it's totally different what we're doing now and we're not going to go anywhere. And so yeah, we fail to understand this. Another big thing which we fail to understand at an early stage is the way Egyptians understand startups. So Tabby was viewed as a startup and a lot of them failed actually. So it was pre and post COVID and a lot of them failed, but Tabby is a startup, so what guarantee do we have that you guys are not going to fail and shut down business? And this is some context that we just didn't have. And this is something that came down the line once we actually started to hire local talent and they just opened our eyes to it and we're like, oh, wow, okay. So we might need to change our strategy, we might need to change the way we communicate with the candidates and ultimately reassure the candidates on what Tabby is doing in the market and what Tabby is planning for the future.

Shannon Ogborn (07:58):

And I think it goes back to this sort of first principle thought of you have to understand motivations of candidates in order to be able to sell them or explain to them the opportunity that is in front of them. And sometimes that is not just the individual's influence on their motivation, but the culture's influence on their motivation, the region, like you're saying, I think that the benefit of having those folks on the ground who understand the market, it's shocking when that person comes in and it's like, yeah, maybe we don't have the best reputation there, or here's what I hear and here's what the region thinks. Let's try to actually make valuable changes. We're not just selling it, we're not just changing the marketing around it, but we're actually making changes through the local talent, understanding what the barriers are.

Alexandre Corbin (08:53):

Definitely. You just mentioned the reputation on the market. So obviously going back to what happened in Egypt, by us launching this market at the speed of light, just to give some numbers, we did hire thousand. I mean we built a thousand people call center within below 12 months. So you can imagine that we made some mistakes. We did not ignore those cultural aspects. We were just not necessarily aware of them and as a lot of those things, so the team that ultimately built Egypt were not Egyptians. We did not properly adapt, and this obviously came with a negative impact on the brand. So this is where we realized, okay, a big thing that Egyptians also care about is the employer branding. And this is where we had to shift this entire marketing and one of the first teams we built, so we hired few recruiters in Egypt and then we right away hired an employer branding team to actually focus on showcasing what is it like working at Tabby? What does Tabby actually do? Once again, we don't have a product on the market, so it's also complicated for the talent to relate to our products, so we have to engage with them in a different way. And so this is where we also created our Instagram page Life at Tabby, which now has over 40,000 followers, which is an amazing platform for us to showcase what Tabby does.

Shannon Ogborn (10:23):

I love that. And like you said, it's not that you are ignoring, it's not that companies aren't necessarily ignoring what the norms are. Sometimes you're just unaware it doesn't make it better, but it gives you a lot of opportunity to make those changes when you do hire local people and you start in this employer brand, like the life at Tabby, really highlighting in setting accurate expectations. One of the other big things that we have talked about is especially in regards to culture's impact on hiring, is knowing what areas should flex in the process in which areas shouldn't, what areas in the process should adapt to culture, communication, style, and what part should remain the same? Would love to hear a little bit more about for you all, what was flexing and what was staying the same and what have some of the learnings been there?

Alexandre Corbin (11:27):

One thing that we are not willing to sacrifice, no matter the market we hire on, is the quality of the candidates we're willing to bring into the business. Now, one thing that we need to understand is what does quality mean in a specific market? The talent in Europe, the talent in Egypt, the talent in the UAE or in Saudi Arabia is very, very different. And you also need to understand that you will have very, very different backgrounds. So Tabby, first FinTech unicorn in the region. So you can just imagine that what we are doing in the region is fairly unique. So now this is where talent acquisition has to think out of the box and just understand that we're not going to get this talent in the region specifically because it does not exist. So what are going to be the new criteria for us to identify this talent we require? And there's a bunch of companies where we are tapping from, so it's not necessarily going to be your classic unicorn, Amazon, Facebook, whatever, but what are some of those local, a bit more old school companies that may have started to digitalize one way or another and that might actually be hiding this incredible talent we're looking for.

Shannon Ogborn (13:02):

And it's not necessarily about that. The existing talent isn't the quality, it just isn't the same pattern of what you've seen as quality in other regions. So you have to make those changes. And I know one of the things that you had said to me about the things that were sort of non-negotiable is things around fairness and structured evaluation and these consistent scoring criteria, and then you're flexing on things like communication style, interview pairing and sort of that offer delivery system. What has it been like to try to balance those things across so many different regions?

Alexandre Corbin (13:47):

So I'll speak specifically about KSA, because this is actually our biggest market. This is where most of our customers are based. And right now what we're doing is being a financial institution heavily regulated in Saudi Arabia, having its own way of protecting its people, especially when it comes to data. It means that we need to hire more and more local talent in Saudi. So there's this big thing called Saudization where it's the government who is actually pushing companies to hire more and more Saudi talent and not necessarily rely on expats, which is fantastic when you think about it, to actually push in getting this local talent. One of the important criteria for us is to actually meet our candidates face-to-face one way or another, whether it's in the online interview or whether it's face-to-face. This is where specifically in Saudi Arabia, you can see this culture difference come in where candidates might not necessarily be comfortable meeting us face-to-face because of the office setup, right? We have an open space here in Saudi Arabia. We do not segregate genders. We do have certain female candidates who might not be comfortable turning on their camera. So this is something we've also agreed that we would adapt to and understand and respect. And bottom line we're hiring for the quality that person has for the experience, for experience, what that person can bring to the business.

Shannon Ogborn (15:30):

Yeah, I think there's just a lot of empathy and understanding that can go a really long way in making candidates feel comfortable and in a lot of ways is just sort of the human nature of what talent should be. And then you layer in some of these parts of we're hiring local talent folks, we're increasing our employer-branded areas to really showcase the things that people in certain regions want to see and understand. And all of those things are super important. And then the other piece that's super important is using data to validate and evolve those decisions. I know you have been making some really big pushes for getting the data into a place that really helps you understand what's working and what's not working and moving your team towards that. Are there any metrics that you have looked at in particular that have been able to show you some of the areas where, like you said earlier, there's been some areas where there was maybe some early problems that were resolved. What data has helped you see some of that?

Alexandre Corbin (16:44):

So there's actually a very interesting metric, which I track, which is the candidate experience, which it's a classic NPS score. So the cNPS. So every single candidate that goes through the process at Tabby, whether they get an offer or they get rejected, will get a survey. And ultimately what we want to understand is would you recommend Tabby's process, right? Would you actually recommend a friend to come and meet us and potentially get a job? And we see a huge difference between regions on the engineering side of things. So this is where we focus mainly in Europe where the cNPS score is actually fairly low. We unfortunately see a lot, and candidates just also get upset when they get rejected by a recruiter, which is something I get now in the UAE as well as Saudi. So of course those are product markets for us. And Tabby is pretty big here.

(17:54):

So everybody knows Tabby, right? Tabby is the hot company everybody wants to work for. When we headhunt, any candidates response rate is around 80%, which is just insane. It's amazing. And the candidates go through a similar process, but there is one thing we see that the region is known for having very welcoming people. They just have this sense of building this extra connection. We have right now cNPS score in the region of 45 exactly with certain recruiters having hundred hundred the top score, which is incredible. We get an insane amount of referrals from rejected candidates. And this just says a lot about the way candidates in the region feel about this interaction with a recruiter. It's much more than, okay, that person is just assessing me. It's actually I am building my network, which down the line could be useful for either of us and for whoever lives in the region, it'll take roughly six months for anybody to get a new job. It's a very, very competitive market. And once again, as I mentioned, the market values a lot, this face-to-face networking type interaction. We do see a very, very big difference here.

Shannon Ogborn (19:25):

cNPS or any NPS, the scores can be a little bit confusing. I think anything over a 30-ish is pretty good. And then as it gets to 50, you're like doing amazing. A hundred is like you have no detractors, which is wild. And...

Alexandre Corbin (19:41):

There's nothing above hundred.

Shannon Ogborn (19:43):

Right, exactly. It makes a meaningful difference. And then one of the other things that I thought you mentioned previously that was interesting is sort of this funnel analytics and pass through rates to help identify where there's that cultural mismatch.

Alexandre Corbin (19:58):

We are still in the process of becoming a much more data analytical department because ultimately data just tells you so much about your funnel health, what the candidates might need, bottleneck, et cetera, et cetera. So one thing where we can really see ultimately data really talking to us is on the customer service side of things. So we do mass hiring. To give you some numbers, we are expected to deliver batches of 120 candidates every single week, which is massive. We're talking to thousands of candidates every single week. So you can really see those movements and anytime you change something within the process, immediately you see those numbers or going up or going down. So right now, the main thing which we're fixing, so the way it goes, candidates get initial four or five minute screening, and then we invite them for assessments, online assessments. Right now what is happening is we see that we only have roughly 20 to 30% of the candidates, which will actually take the assessment, which is very low.

(21:18):

Why Tabby? In Cairo, we are the best payers. So we always look at the data because we want to hire the best people, and so we will pay fairly. So why is that? And ultimately it goes back to the lack of connection with candidates. Is it even real? And we've got emails from candidates, I got this assessment, but I mean, is it really from Tabby is real. So what we are actually changing right now, we're putting in place a recruitment center. So instead of having candidates do the assessments online, we're actually inviting them to come and meet us. And everything becomes much more real. You can actually put a face to this team that you've had over the five-minute call and you get to see the offices, where is it that you might be working in the future? So it just makes everything much, much more real.

(22:18):

Another thing which we totally missed is that there are internet issues in Cairo. If unfortunately your internet chops, that's it. I mean, you're out, you felt the assessment. Another thing is people don't necessarily have laptops, so we expect them to take an assessment from home from nothing. I mean, they just don't have the tools. So this is where we're just allowing them to come meet us. We have the laptops, we've got a stable internet, you can actually ask questions as well. And they always have a lot of questions and it just becomes much more personal.

Shannon Ogborn (22:56):

I think that's the importance of noting that data only tells part of the story. It gives you what is being impacted, but it doesn't tell you the why. And as talent leaders and professionals, it's our job to investigate the why is this happening. And I'm curious, since you've started doing all of those things, not just that what you were just talking about, but everything we've talked about, what are sort of the results you have seen? Have you gotten more people doing the assessments, maybe increasing the cNPS?

Alexandre Corbin (23:35):

I actually just got the number today, earlier today. So the first real batch whom we invited to this recruitment center, 80% of invited candidates showed up, which is tremendous. We did not expect such a number. So it seems that the direction we've decided to take is actually going to yield the results, which is fantastic. So that is obviously for customer service on the branding side of things, right? I mean, we've also been heavily investing in it over the past two months. I mean, just to name one score. So our Glassdoor score actually went from 3.4 to 3.7 now. So we do see some results. This is also because we have a big, big project going on in the background to fix any challenges that we might have, not only in the recruitment process, but also in operations training, et cetera. So we do see some progress.

Shannon Ogborn (24:41):

This has been a lot of incredible advice, and I hate to ask you to boil it down to sort of one lesson in culture's influence on hiring. Before we get into some of our questions, we like to ask everybody, but if you were to give a talent leader one main core pillar of advice when trying to create a global organization, what would that be? Based on your experience?

Alexandre Corbin (25:15):

Based on my experience, and not only my experience, actually, you need to hire strong local talent from the start. Don't assume you know better because you just don't. They work, I mean, depending on the region, the country, but I mean, every country has specific labor law, which you cannot guess. Every country has its culture. Every country has its way of communicating. Every country looks for different things within an employer, and there's no need to just guess or assume that because this has worked in Dubai, that it will work in Riyadh and in Cairo and in Paris and whatever. It's going to be very different. So yeah, invest in strong local talent from the get-go.

Shannon Ogborn (26:11):

Love that. Yeah, and it's like you said, it's not just about communication. It's not just about culture. The compliance part is another big thing, and that's another can of worms. There's so much labor compliance and hiring compliance, and you can make some pretty detrimental mistakes. So I love that advice to wrap it up. Well, we have our questions that we'd like to ask everyone that we're going to get to. These now live in our extended version on YouTube. So if you are interested in hearing what hiring excellence means to Alex, his recruiting hot take, and one thing he would tell his early career self, please head to YouTube. 

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