In 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.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:44]:
Hello everyone and welcome to episode eight of the Recruiting 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 organizational flexibility. Neil also gave me an update on Penguin Random House’s new social recruiting initiative, the Scheme. Enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:01:20]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. I’m in the offices of Penguin Random House today talking to Neil Morrison. Hi Neil, how are you doing? Would you just sort of like to introduce yourself?
Neil Morrison [00:01:34]:
Yeah. 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.
Matt Alder [00:01:45]:
Absolutely. And 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 is really interesting and I kind of thought worth sharing again. So what are your views on the sort of meeting of work technology and work technology and people?
Neil Morrison [00:02:23]:
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, 10 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.
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
Of course. Yeah.
Neil Morrison [00:03:05]:
And therefore employees have an expectation of technology within the Workspace which is based on their experience in 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. That’s 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.
Matt Alder [00:04:01]:
I suppose it’s interesting because certainly in the last few years, looking at it from the outside in, it seems that HR has been moving towards big unified systems where everything is sort of done in the. Everything is sort of done in the same place and it’s all about process and business and that kind of thing. And do you think that needs to change or it is changing, or does that work alongside what’s kind of going on with this sort of consumer grade technology?
Neil Morrison [00:04:31]:
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 organizations are moving and adapting so very, very quickly, because the world is changing so very quickly that you need your 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 organizational reality. And I think where we’ll see things change is to a more versatile, more even potentially disposable approach to technology which says 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 than it is to a mortgage and a house, you know, it’s that kind of shorter cycle.
Matt Alder [00:05:32]:
I think that’s interesting actually, because I was reading something the other day that someone was writing about change management and that, you know, change management was a specialized skill and you know, you called upon it occasionally. And it just seems to me that certainly seem to that writer that actually change management changes the norm. And understanding how to sort of move through these systems quickly and find out what’s right for you was incredibly important. I mean, do you think that companies and HR departments in particular are sort of set up for that kind of thinking.
Neil Morrison [00:06:05]:
I don’t, 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 thought. A lot of organizations are still doing three, five year business plans or strategies which I think in some ways 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 and I think that. But that’s a mindset and it’s an approach rather than it is saying you’ve got big organizations which are, you know, slow and laborious and then you’ve got small startups which are agile. I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can have the mentality.
Matt Alder [00:07:02]:
Yeah, regardless that mindset mentality, I think that’s interesting, I mean, particularly I suppose, with reference to the changes your company’s had to go through in the last few years. Because I’m, 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 has that sort of panned out? How has that sort of affected, you know, the way you work and the way you think?
Neil Morrison [00:07:28]:
Sure, I mean, absolutely. 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 during a period of time. But you know, the way in which we use technology was still very, very different. People read ebooks predominantly on a laptop. The Kindle didn’t exist, Kobo didn’t exist, Nook didn’t exist. The iPhone had just launched. I mean, this was only kind of 2008. So it’s not as if it’s, you know, hundreds of years ago.
Matt Alder [00:08:00]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Neil Morrison [00:08:01]:
And I think the biggest change, the biggest step change we saw was when people realized that technology was an opportunity as opposed to being a threat.
Matt Alder [00:08:12]:
Yes.
Neil Morrison [00:08:13]:
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 more easily than ever before. We can get books to market quicker than ever before. Our cost of production can potentially reduce if we just go to a straight to ebook 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.
Matt Alder [00:09:05]:
Yeah, I think that’s obviously, you know, particularly in the case of the organization, but I think I’ve noticed it, you know, I noticed it in almost every organization that that kind of thing, you know, that kind of thing happens, I suppose changing tax 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 of talent you want 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.
Neil Morrison [00:09:45]:
Sure. Okay. So this is the scheme. The scheme, mainly because we couldn’t come up with a better name for it. 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 recognizing that we needed to be marketing books in a different way, and in order to do that, we wanted to create a different type of marketing campaign for the scheme itself. So we started off by using Tumblr. Because of the demographic that we were looking at. Tumblr seemed to be, I think it’s 40% under 35 or something like that. So it’s right in the kind of.
Matt Alder [00:10:39]:
Sweet space that’ll be why I don’t use it.
Neil Morrison [00:10:41]:
Yeah, me neither. There are some kind of blind, some strange looks going around the office as someone mentioned Tumblr, but using that as our main means and then pushing it through our social channels 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 marketeers, if that makes sense.
Matt Alder [00:11:06]:
Yeah, totally.
Neil Morrison [00:11:06]:
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 and a half thousand visits to the site. The application rate is interesting. We’re just under 200 applicants at the moment. I think that’s probably going to pick up as we’re now kind of entering the Easter holidays and the groups of people that we’re looking at are on 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. 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, through to that site.
Matt Alder [00:12:12]:
Fantastic. And is there any sort of word on the quality of applications yet or are you sort of holding off to look at them all together or what’s the, what’s your sort of view on, you know, the quality that’s coming through?
Neil Morrison [00:12:23]:
Yes. 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. So we’re purely looking for potential. The answers that we’re seeing. I mean, I can’t say they’re all top 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, what education they’ve got. We’re just judging them purely on that. On those answers.
Matt Alder [00:13:01]:
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.
Neil Morrison [00:13:11]:
Yeah, I mean, this has been really eye opening for us. So the total campaign is less than 100 pounds in, in its entirety. We’ve built the site within the HR team ourselves. So we had a bit of a cost in terms of a Tumblr design, we had a URL and then a bit of an interface for a form to complete, but that’s it. And because we’ve used social channels to push it out, that’s been entirely free. So, yeah, it’s quite different to the days when you would have built a site for 20, 30,000 pounds and had to advertise it.
Matt Alder [00:13:52]:
Double that amount on advertising. No, that’s brilliant. I think it’s such a fantastic initiative in so many ways. Just final questions, because we talk about technology, we’re talking about change, we’re talking about thinking about things differently. What advice would you give HR professionals, or even recruitment professionals who are looking at this sort of the technology change and everything that’s going out there and feeling perhaps intimidated by it? Where should they start? What kind of advice would you give?
Neil Morrison [00:14:23]:
I would just go and look at what’s out there and speak to people who are either using the technology or people who are selling the technology. And I think just go and explore, be curious, recognize that 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 the view that says, actually what could we do that would 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 get a few clients on board to use their products, you know, then you can really kind of maximize that return.
Matt Alder [00:15:14]:
So do you have the power of being an early adopter? Absolutely.
Neil Morrison [00:15:18]:
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 it to meet your needs. And the price point tends to be a lot lower.
Matt Alder [00:15:28]:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for your time and for speaking to me.
Neil Morrison [00:15:32]:
It’s great.
Matt Alder [00:15:33]:
That was Neil Morrison. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to the podcast in itunes and also on Stitcher. You can find past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. i’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
