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
You can also find my key takeaways from the event here on Facebook
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for the podcast this week comes from my own company, Metashift. We live in 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 mattashift.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:00]:
Hi everyone and welcome to a special episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. This week I’ve been at HR Tech World in Paris and I wanted to bring a flavour 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 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 events MC yesterday. I really, really enjoyed Eve Morio, Richard Branson of course I’m particularly quite selfishly because I learned something about running our company around simplicity, around conflict, around getting through that in an organization from Eve’s talk. That simplicity thing was brilliant and Branson doing the same thing. His biggest thing have a party. Bring people for parties all the time, not just 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 being in that position in 40 years. Moving on to my first interview, it was very, very interesting to talk to Lisa Nelson, the VP of hr@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.
Lisa Nelson [00:02:35]:
So 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 me, Tiq, Tinder, OkCupid and a number of other businesses that we’ve grown both through acquisition and organically over the past few years now.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
You’Ve just been on stage presenting, talking about the very large technical transformation that Match has gone through. What’s kind of provoked that technical transformation and been happening?
Lisa Nelson [00:03:04]:
Sure, it’s a great question. And we’ve initiated a pretty significant architectural transformation which can effectively be summarized by modernizing 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.
Matt Alder [00:03:39]:
And what are the people implications of doing that from an HR perspective?
Lisa Nelson [00:03:44]:
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.
Matt Alder [00:04:03]:
Have you had to bring additional talent into the company or rethink about how, how you sort of structure your development team?
Lisa Nelson [00:04:10]:
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.
Matt Alder [00:04:38]:
And you have a HR tech roadmap to go to go with that, Is that right? You have your own kind of HR transformation.
Lisa Nelson [00:04:46]:
We always have a HR roadmap. But what we found this year was that we had to pivot pretty quickly to deprioritize some of the initiatives that were purely HR driven and really align them more towards the outcome of this architectural transformation. And some of those things invested that we invested in were a common set of values, common incentive plans and obviously a commitment to global mobility where we were able, we were able to solve some of our labour shortages by looking to our international workforce.
Matt Alder [00:05:17]:
That’s interesting. And I know that you had some interesting findings around the social media stuff that you were doing. What happened with your social media strategy?
Lisa Nelson [00:05:27]:
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. And 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. And we really think that that played a part in piquing curiosity and interest in the mobility initiative.
Matt Alder [00:06:07]:
And was that via just open Pages, all the usual platforms, or were you employing a specific bit of software to do that?
Lisa Nelson [00:06:15]:
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 trialling Facebook at 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.
Matt Alder [00:06:50]:
Fantastic. That’s always good to hear. And what does the sort of next 6 to 12 months look like? How are things sort of shaping up for you and your team?
Lisa Nelson [00:06:59]:
I think the next six to 12 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.
Matt Alder [00:07:24]:
Lisa, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lisa Nelson [00:07:26]:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:07:29]:
My next interview was 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?
Jane McConnell [00:07:55]:
Hi, nice to meet you.
Matt Alder [00:07:56]:
Would you like to introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jane McConnell [00:07:58]:
Sure. Well, I’m Jane McConnell. I am specialized in digital transformation. I have been working as an independent Advisor for about 14 years with very large organizations. I’m actually based in the south of France, based in Provence, in a tiny village which is lovely place to live.
Matt Alder [00:08:19]:
Fantastic.
Jane McConnell [00:08:20]:
And I work with different organizations throughout Europe and I’ve been dedicating 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.
Matt Alder [00:08:40]:
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 sort of view on what comes out of the surveys?
Jane McConnell [00:08:57]:
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.
Matt Alder [00:09:53]:
And what do you think most HR professionals are currently doing in that space at the moment? I mean, I was very struck. We’ve just watched David Ching from AOL do a presentation about future technology and the transformation of kind of everything and he kind of followed some very staid 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?
Jane McConnell [00:10:27]:
Well, I think HR now is primarily fulfilling the historical function of hr, which is has to do with compliance, job descriptions, 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 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 anyway.
Matt Alder [00:11:33]:
Yeah, I think that was kind of very clear, as I say, from the sort of 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?
Jane McConnell [00:11:49]:
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 this 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 but what I see. And I think HR has tremendous potential, but for the moment is very far from realizing that potential.
Matt Alder [00:13:19]:
And finally, every good event should end up in the local pub. Here’s Bill Boorman and Chris Hoyt giving their thoughts on how they found the event. Hi guys, how are you? How was HR tech?
Bill Boorman [00:13:36]:
A lot of technology and after Vegas I don’t want to see any more.
Bill Boorman [00:13:37]:
It was what I did notice noticed about this event was that the vendors appear to be getting a bit closer to the market. There’s a lot less people in suits.
Lisa Nelson [00:13:46]:
The booths look a bit better.
Bill Boorman [00:13:47]:
That might sound like a cosmetic thing. I think it’s showing a bit of a shift of bringing the vendor sales community together with the buying community in a more understandable way.
Matt Alder [00:14:55]:
Chris, I know it’s been your your dream for many years to be interviewed in a pub. So here we are in a pub. What do you think? How’s your trip?
Matt Alder [00:14:55]:
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 here 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.
Matt Alder [00:14:55]:
Thanks very much for listening to this special HR Tech episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. You can find past episodes@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.
