n this episode Matt Alder talks to Neil Morrison Group HR Director for Penguin Random House UK.
The space where people, work and technology meet is becoming ever more fascinating and is throwing up huge issues for HR departments round organisational flexibility and change management.
In this interview Matt and Neil discuss how Penguin Random House has had to respond to the digital revolution and the technology driven change which is fast becoming the norm in HR. Neil share his thoughts on the evolving nature of HR technology and also gives an insight into a groundbreaking approach Penguin Random House is taking to recruit marketing talent for their business
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Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep 8: How Should HR Respond to the Digital Revolution?
Support for this podcast comes from RecFest 2. RecFest 2 is the in-house recruitment festival of the summer with an incredible lineup of speakers and the biggest conversation of like-minded recruiters in the world. RecFest 2 is taking place on July the 9th aboard the HMS president in London. Get 50% off your ticket to the conversation right now by going to recfest2.com and using the discount code "podcast". There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind. At all the ages of history. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 8 of the Recreating Future Podcast. I've always been fascinated by the intersection of people, work and technology and this week's guest is someone who's written and spoken a lot on this topic. Neil Morrison, the group HR director for Penguin Random House in the UK. In the interview we have a broad discussion about HR technology and organisational flexibility. Neil also gave me an update on Penguin Random House's new social recruiting initiative #thescheme. Enjoy. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recreating Future Podcast interview. I'm in the offices of Penguin Random House today talking to Neil Morrison. Hi Neil, how are you? Would you just sort of like to introduce yourself? Yes, so my name is Neil Morrison, I'm the HR director for Penguin Random House here in the UK and I also write and speak about employment work and various other bits and bobs. Absolutely. I think that's really kind of what's prompted this interview because I read a blog post that you wrote. I think it was towards the end of last year and it was all about HR and technology, how you'd been to some conferences, looked at some startup companies and you sort of had some thoughts on technology, HR, the future of work, all that kind of stuff which was just really interesting and I kind of thought worth sharing again. So what are your views on the sort of meeting of work technology and people? Sure, so I think the thing that started me thinking around this was the fact that historically technology has always been enterprise first and then gone to the consumer. So if we think about mobile phones or we think about Microsoft or even PCs, so they would have been in the workplace and then they would have been adopted by consumers after when they get to a price point that could be achieved. But what we have seen over the past sort of five, ten years is that technology goes consumer first and then enterprises are trying to have to work out how to use it and social technologies would be one of the kind of big examples. And therefore employees have an expectation of technology within the workspace which is based on their experience and their consumer lives and traditional HR technologies just don't come up to anywhere near the sort of experience that people expect. But what I'm starting to see bubbling under the surface is a lot of smaller tech companies that are introducing really interesting innovative products which I think do kind of excite employees and meet that expectation of being able to interact in a way that feels like a really good user experience, this is available 24/7, that matches what I can do in the rest of my life but in relation to the workspace. And I think that's what I find kind of fascinating is how we leverage that ability within work. I suppose it's interesting because certainly in the last few years looking at it from the outside it seems that HR has been moving towards big unified systems where everything is sort of done in the same place and it's all about process and business and that kind of thing. Do you think that needs to change or is it changing or does that work alongside what's kind of going on with this sort of consumer grade technology? What do you think? I mean I think it has to change and I think what we're starting to see is some of the bigger HR technology vendors also recognizing that this needs to change because our organisations are moving and adapting so very very quickly because the world is changing so very quickly that you need your technology to support that and to allow you to do it and if it's very hardwired and built in a very steady state then that doesn't actually match the organisational reality and I think where we'll see things change is to a more versatile, more even potentially disposable approach to technology which says that I'll buy it over a short period of time and at the end of it it probably will be no longer fit for purpose and I'll upgrade to something else but that time period being more akin to a mobile phone contract and it is to a mortgage and a house you know it's that kind of shorter cycle. I think that's interesting actually because I was reading something the other day that someone was writing about change management and that change management was a specialised skill and you know you called upon it occasionally and it just seems to me that certainly seems to that writer that actually changes the norm and you know understanding how to sort of move through these systems quickly and find out what's right for you was incredibly important. Do you think that companies and HR departments in particular are sort of set up for that kind of thinking? I don't. I think generally what you're required still to do is put in place a big business case with a long-term plan and try and justify why this investment would be beneficial over a long period of time and that's how we've thought. I mean a lot of organisations are still doing you know three five-year business plans or strategies which I think in some ways you know is slightly bizarre given how much change we're going through so I think we've still got a way to go in terms of that mindset and I don't think it means that you can't be large and agile I think you can be large and agile I think that kind of but that's a mindset and it's the approach rather than it is saying you've got big organisations which are you know slow and laborious and then you've got small startups with your agile I don't think that's the case I think you're going to have the mentality. Yeah that kind of mindset mentality. I think that's interesting I'm particularly I suppose with reference to the changes your companies had to go through in the last few years because I'm thinking that you've probably been whether you wanted to or not at the kind of forefront of the digital revolution with what's happened in you know what's happened in publishing I mean how's that how has that sort of paned out how has that sort of affected you know the way you work and the way you think. Sure I mean absolutely if you if you kind of go back to when I joined what was Random House so I mean one major change was the biggest merger in publishing history to ever have happened here at a time but you know the way in which we use technology was still very very different people read ebooks predominantly on the laptop the Kindle didn't exist, COBO didn't exist, NOC didn't exist, the iPhone had just launched and I mean this was only kind of 2008 so it's not as if it's you know hundreds of years ago. Yeah absolutely and I think the biggest change the biggest step change we saw was when people realised that technology was an opportunity as opposed to being a threat yes and I think initially people saw it as a threat because it was going to change how we did things and moving that mindset to actually saying well if we embrace this actually what are the opportunities for us so for example it's much easier for us to communicate direct with consumers than it's ever been before we can talk about what we do to so many people's so more easily than ever before we can get books to market quicker than ever before you know our cost of production can potentially reduce if we just go to a straight to e-book format so there's all these ways in which you can harness it but that change in mindset was the biggest thing because we weren't noticing the opportunities because people were worried about the threats yeah I think that's obviously you know particularly the case of the organisation but I think I've noticed it you know I know seeing almost every organisation that kind of thing you know that kind of thing happens I suppose changing the chat tack slightly but staying on the same subject you're currently running a really interesting recruitment you know recruitment scheme and you know this is obviously to do with the changing types how are you in your business but also I suppose harnessing you know the new sort of social world that we now live in talk us through what you've been doing and what's kind of what the results are looking like sure okay so this is the scheme hashtag the scheme mainly because we can come up with a better name for it so and the idea was to try and attract 18 year olds plus into publishing which can often be seen as a bit of a traditional industry to reach out to people who didn't necessarily need to have a degree but to come in and work for us particularly in our marketing areas so recognising that we needed to be marketing books in a different way and in order to do that we wanted to create a different marketing campaign for the scheme itself so we started off by using Tumblr because of the demographic that we were looking at Tumblr seem to be I think it's 40% under 35 or something like that so it's right in the kind of sweet space that would be why I don't use it. There are some kind of blind some strange looks going around the office as someone mentioned but using that as our as our main means and then pushing out through our social channels yeah and trying to create an event from it so we wanted to create a lot of noise around the scheme and almost represent a marketing campaign for marketers if that makes sense yeah totally I mean what we saw was quite phenomenal so we had 3,000 visits to the site in the first three hours of launch we had a huge reaction on social media and then into mainstream press as well mainstream trade press both in publishing and HR picked up on this we're now up just over a week in we're up at about 13,500 visits to the site the application rate is interesting we're just under 200 applicants at the moment okay I think that's probably going to pick up as we we're now kind of entering the Easter holidays and the groups people that we're looking at are on a holiday so we think that that's going to pick up but the vast majority of the traffic has come through our social channels and 80% are in the age range that we're looking at so we're seeing that we are attracting the right kind of demographic through to that site fantastic and is there any sort of word on the quality applications yet or are you sort of holding off to look at them all together or what's your sort of view on you know the quality that's coming through yeah so we're not accepting CVs on this and part of that reason was actually to make it a little bit more even for people who may not have experience or may not have qualifications that we're purely looking for potential yeah the answers that we're seeing I mean I can't say they're all quality but you wouldn't expect that but we're seeing some really really interesting ideas and of course we have no idea who these people are how old they are what experience they've got fantastic well education they've got we're just judging purely on that yeah I mean there's so much going on there and I'd imagine that it probably represents a rather large cost saving on you know traditional recruiting costs and advertising and all that all that sort of stuff as well yeah I mean this this has been really eye-opening for us so the total campaign is less than a hundred pounds in its entirety yeah we've built the site within the HR team ourselves so we had a bit of a constant in terms of the Tumblr design we had a URL and then a bit of an interface for a form to complete but that's it because we've used social channels to push it out that's been entirely free so yeah it quite different to the days when you were to build a site for 20 30 thousand pounds and had to advertise it yeah double that amount on advertising that's brilliant I think it's such a fantastic initiative in so many ways final questions because you know we're talking about technology we're talking about change we're talking about thinking about things differently what advice would you give you know HR professionals or even recruitment professionals who are who are looking at this sort of the technology change everything that's going out there and feeling perhaps you know intimidated intimidated by it where you know where should they start what kind of advice would you give I mean I would just go and look at what's out there and speak to to people who are either using the technology or people who were selling the technology and I think just go and explore be curious yeah recognize the price points aren't the same as they were 10 years ago and therefore don't start with a view that says the board will never back this start with a view that says actually what could we do that be really exciting and really engaging for potential employees future employees or our existing employees and then just go and be curious and learn and that's the way you find out about things find out about them before they're big don't wait for everyone else to kind of discover it get there and you know potentially where people are looking to to get a few clients on board to use their products you know then you can really kind of maximize a return to the power of being an early adopter absolutely both in terms of kind of being able to shape the product so if you're an early adopter then often the vendors will work with you to help shape you to meet your needs and the price point tends to be a lot lower fantastic thank you very much for your time for speaking to me that was Neil Morrison thanks for listening you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes and also on Stitcher you can find past episodes at www.RFpodcast.com I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me this is my show [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]