This week I’ve been at HR Tech World in Paris, where over 3000 HR and Recruiting professionals in European came together to listen to their peers, industry thought leaders and a line up of key note speakers which included Sir Richard Branson.
In this episode you’ll hear from some of the attendees in addition to two interviews round the topic of digital transformation.
Lisa Nelson is the Global VP of HR for Match.com and tells us how HR changed its focus to align with the technical transformation that was taking place in the business and talks about a surprising outcome from their Social Recruiting activity.
Jane McConnell is an analyst and advisor on Digital Workplace strategies and she talks about the role HR needs to play in digital transformation.
You’ll also hear Johnny Campbell, Bill Boorman and Chris Hoyt give their thoughts on the event
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Episode 32: HR, Recruiting and Digital Transformation at HR Tech World
The support for the podcast this week comes from my own company, MetaShift. We live at an age of digital noise and distraction. Cutting through to connect and engage with your audience is a real challenge. Talent attraction is a focus for everyone, but how can you be sure you're getting the attention necessary to persuade the right people to join your company? MetaShift is a talent attention consultancy, and we can help you optimize your talent attraction strategy to stand out and be heard. To find out more, go to www.talentattention.com or contact me directly on mat@metashift.co.uk. [Music] There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind, and all the ages of history. Hi everyone, and welcome to a special episode of the Recreating Future podcast. This week I've been at HR Tech World in Paris, and I wanted to bring a flavor of the show to people on the podcast who may not have been able to attend. I've done some recordings from the show floor, I've done some recordings at a social event afterwards, and I have two interviews for this episode, one with Lisa Nelson, the VP of HR globally for match.com, and one with Jane McConnell, who was an analyst who was also attending the event. First of all, though, let's hear from Johnny Campbell, who was the event's MC. Yes, they are really, really enjoyed. Ed Morio, Mr. Branson, of course. I'm particularly quite selfishly because I learned something right running our company around simplicity, around conflict, around getting through that in an organization from Eve's talk. That's a simplicity thing with Brilliant, and Branson doing the same thing. His biggest thing, have a party, bring people for parties all the time, not just drinks in the office, but parties, and get to know your staff that way. He looks like it worked for him for his life. I'm sure he's got lots of stories about Studio 54 and everything else. I wouldn't mind me in the opposition in 40 years. Moving on to my first interview, it was very, very interesting to talk to Lisa Nelson, the VP of HR at match.com. Some very interesting stuff in here about how HR in their organization has been coping with the technical transformation that match.com has undergone, and a really interesting byproduct from their social media recruiting strategy. Hi, my name is Lisa. I'm the VP of HR for match, and match has grown to include a number of market leading brands in our portfolio, match, as well as meatick, tinder, and a number of other businesses that we've grown both through acquisition and organically over the past few years. You've just been on stage presenting, talking about the very large technical transformation matches gone through. What kind of provokes that technical transformation and what's been happening? Sure. It's a great question, and we've initiated a pretty significant architectural transformation, which can effectively be summarised by modernising and consolidating the desktop experience across our subscription businesses. We're midway through it. There's still a lot to do and a lot of learning come from that. It generates from a need to deliver a phenomenal desktop experience to our members, as well as this growing shift towards mobile adoption of dating products and really wanting to be able to triple down on our investment in mobile development. What are the people implications of doing that from an HR perspective? Pretty significant in that we've shifted away from brand-specific roadmap mentality to something which is more integrated and aligned around one central platform. Again, this is for our subscription products and really embracing a different way of working, thinking, and prioritising technical projects. Have you had to bring additional talent into the company or rethink about how you sort of structure your development team? Definitely. We've invested in agile training as well as scrum masters. These are relatively new key hires for us, but at the same time we've been able to staff some of our most important strategic tech positions by looking at our internal workforce, and that has included bringing people from some of our different offices around the world to our Dallas headquarters to really be the architects and leaders of this tech transformation. You have a HR tech roadmap to go with that. Is that right? You have your own HR transformation that's going on? We always have a HR roadmap, but what we found this year was that we had to pivot pretty quickly to deprioritise some of the initiatives that were purely HR driven and really align them more towards the outcome of this architectural transformation. Some of those things that we invested in were a common set of values, common incentive plans, and obviously a commitment to global mobility where we were able to solve some of our labour shortages by looking to our international workforce. That's interesting. I know that you have some interesting findings around the social media stuff that you were doing. What happened with your social media strategy? Another great question. Well, like any company that is in the war for talent, so to speak, we were looking for different channels to connect with predominantly technical and product talent, but really for positions across all of our functional areas. While we embarked upon a pretty significant investment in social media activity and conversion goals, what we found was that we could use social media as a tool for communicating with our internal employees. We built a lot of awareness, engagement, and just a knowledge of what was happening in our different businesses around the world. We really think that that played a part in peaking curiosity and interest in the mobility initiative. Was that via just open pages on all the usual platforms, or were you employing a specific sort of better software to do that? Open pages on all the usual platforms. We haven't had much, if any, employee resistance to sort of crossing the lines between personal social media and professional. At the same time, we have been trialing Facebook work within a small segment of our company, and we're working with them to see whether that makes sense to roll out on a more broad basis. But in general, it's just been employees, individual social media pages, and we've been able to deliver messaging and communication, which is honestly much more powerful and effective than some of our go-to systems like email. Fantastic, that's always good to hear. And what does the sort of next six to twelve months look like? How are things sort of shaping out for you and your team? I think the next six to twelve months involve us ensuring that we've achieved the project successfully, that we continue to architect really important and challenging technical problems for our employees to solve. And just to make sure that we're keeping up to speed with what's happening in the broader ecosystem and constantly providing an environment which is challenging and rewarding to our folks. Lisa, thank you very much for talking to me. It's my pleasure, thank you. My next interview is with Jane McConnell, who's an advisor and an analyst helping organizations with digital transformation. Jane does some very, very interesting surveys and has some very, very insightful opinions on the role of HR in digital transformation. Hi everyone, I'm still here at HR Tech World. I'm doing some more interviews and I'm talking to Jane McConnell. Hi Jane, how are you? Hi, nice to meet you. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Sure, while I'm Jane McConnell, I am specialized in digital transformation. I have been working as an independent advisor for about fourteen years with very large organizations. I'm actually based in the south of France, based in Provence in a tiny village which is a lovely place to live. Fantastic. And I work with different organizations throughout Europe. And I've been dedicated more and more time to my work as an analyst right now. I've been running a survey every year for nine years. The ninth one has just been published and the title of the report is The Organization in the Digital Age. Very interesting. I saw you published a LinkedIn post before the conference about digital transformation and HR's role in that. What were your findings? What was your view on what comes out of them? What's really interesting is the post I did on LinkedIn is really a long series of posts I've been doing on HR since 2008. That was a year in my survey where it suddenly clicked on me that HR people were not involved very much in digital things. And I noticed it several years in a row. I wrote several articles about it. I got a lot of feedback from HR professionals. And I suddenly realized through a variety of different things over the past year that I feel like HR is the role in the organization that should be the best suited to lead or co-lead the transformation of organizations. That's to say how people work. Digital isn't the only thing that's transforming organizations. It's more of an enabler but it's definitely pushing people in a certain direction. And what do you think most HR professionals are currently doing in that space at the moment? I was very struck. We've just watched David Sheng from AOL to a presentation about future technology and the transformation of everything. And he kind of followed some very state technology presentations about HR that I didn't feel were kind of in the same ballpark in terms of what's going on in technology. So where do you think HR is now and where does it need to go? Well, I think HR now is primarily fulfilling the historical function of HR which has to do with compliance, job descriptions or org charts. The whole traditional way of handling I would say human resources if I can use quotation marks in the air. Of course. And HR based on what I've seen in a lot of companies I've come into contact with and from what people have told me in response to my LinkedIn post, I got some quite strong opinions there. Either HR has to change radically or HR is going to disappear and disappear can mean a lot of things. We can mean the dedicated HR professional is no longer a role in an organization and HR becomes part of something that managers do. Well, there's just so much to say about how how HR can be disrupted. I think a main thing is HR needs to get closer to people and closer to collaboration and different ways of working that enable people to do what people will be doing anyway. Or should be doing anything. Yeah, I think that was kind of very clear as I say from the juxtaposition of presentations and things like that. Obviously we've been here for a couple of days at the conference. What's your sort of one takeaway from HR tech world? That there's an interest in data and analytics which is a little frightening on one side and intriguing on the other. I don't know a lot about analytics so I'm spending some time during these two days getting to know more about it. The HR people who are here are very motivated to transform the way they work in organizations. I spent an hour yesterday with one of the biggest industrial companies in the world telling me about their HR program and plans for the next 12 months, three years, five years, and it's a very agile approach they're taking. They're going to be making fundamental changes. It's very impressive what they're doing. Now, I don't think that to be honest, I don't think that's the majority of HR people. I'm running a little survey online right now. Just eight questions, takes five minutes. I don't know. I think by the time this podcast goes live, it'll probably be finished but it's a very quick sort of 10-day thing and I'll be publishing a report and for the moment what's coming out of it is that HR does need to change the way they're going to work and the people taking the survey are about 50% HR professionals and 50% non-HR professionals so we're getting the perception of HR from other people and it's not very positive. I'm sorry to be so negative but that's my role as an analyst is to report what I see and to interpret what I see and I think HR has tremendous potential but for the moment is very far from realizing that potential. And finally, every good event should end up in the local pub. Here's Bill Borman and Chris Hoyt giving their thoughts on how they found the event. Hi guys, how are you? How was HR Tech? A lot of technology and after Vegas, I don't want to say any more. What I did notice about this event was that the vendors appear to be getting a bit closer to the market. There's a lot of those people in suits, the booths look a bit better, that might sound like a cosmetic thing but I think it's showing a bit of a shift of bringing the vendors sales community together with the buying community in a more understandable way. Chris, I know it's been your dream for many years to be interviewed in the pub. So here we are in the pub. What do you think? How's your trip? Actually, I find it fascinating that you can add sound effects to make this study cubicle sound like a pub and I find it interesting. The people who have been great, the event's been fantastic and the interaction with the vendors. So it's interesting from a perspective of the US HR technology conference and this one, it's very different. I find the vendors here a little more engaging so it's a lot of fun and the audience is a little bit different so it's been a good experience. Thanks very much for listening to this special HR Tech episode of the Recreating Future podcast. You can find past episodes at www.rfpodcast.com and you can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]