HR Tech World – Day 1 - My Experience

HR Tech World – Day 1 - My Experience

Well the time has come to reflect on what was a jam packed, exciting, fun, tiring and inspiring couple of days at the HR Tech World at the ExCel arena in London last week. For those who aren’t familiar with the event, the HR Tech World is recognised as UK’s largest enterprise HR event with decision makers from 60+ countries in attendance – And I must say, it lived up to its billing. I had a fantastic time and met an array of interesting thinkers and leaders from the HR and technology community, and heard from some genuinely inspiring speakers. I was delighted to be there representing Hudson as one of the sponsors of the event. As I have done with past events, I just wanted to share my speaker highlights, reflections and key takeaways now that the dust has settled.

Day One

Across the first day a number of key themes began to emerge that would stay with us for the remainder of the conference including Innovation, storytelling, Tech as an enabler (Augmentation), organisational restructure, transformation & change, courage and many more. I was splitting my time between the exhibition & networking area and the talks. I did manage to get to 4 talks in day one – all of which fascinating and inspiring.

Sir Ken Robinson 

Sir Ken Robinson kicked off proceedings with a terrific opening key note. Essentially what Sir Ken explored was creativity, and how to facilitate and nurture a culture of creativity and innovation, stimulated and enabled through a combination of culture, leadership and technology. In Sir Ken’s view there are 3 key areas which can prevent or facilitate creativity which are Personal/Individual, Group and Culture. 

Personal refers to creating an environment and structure that seeks ‘to develop the creative abilities of every community member’. What this means is that we need to stop pigeon holing individuals as either creative or operational – creativity is not exclusive to the ‘arts’. We are all capable of creativity, we just need the freedom and the tools (tech) in some cases, to enable creativity, and above all we need a culture that encourages creativity at a personal level. Moving on to the group aspect, this is about approaching objectives and challenges as projects by facilitating the formation of dynamic, collaborative and creative teams to tackle problems – Not having individuals siloed by functional skillset within a restrictive framework. Finally, by enabling personal and group creativity will lead to the facilitation of a general culture of creativity – when this is achieved, an organisation is best equipped for agility and innovation within a constantly changing environment.

Sir Ken ended with a fantastic quote (I can’t remember if it was his, or if he attributed it to another source – apologies) – But the quote itself certainly stuck in my mind as it epitomises the point; we must start to ask ‘How are you creative NOT how creative are you’.

Sir Ken Robinson also holds the record for the most viewed TED talk of all time – it is well worth a watch (link here) – and goes some way framing what I have outlined above.

Pranav Chadha

Pranav Chadha has spent nearly a decade working in roles relating to talent acquisition, before joining Adidas is 2008 he held positions within Barclays and Aon-Hewitt. Pranav’s talk; ‘Breaking down talent acquisition Big Data’ centered around the platform he and a small team have developed internally for Adidas which acts as a data catch and self service talent acquisition reporting Tool. I was as blown away by its functionality as I was by its user interface – Pranav et al have created a thing of beauty.

Triggered by an upscaling of the Adidas internal talent acquisition function, Pranav and team were tasked with designing, engineering and implementing an internal platform to track the end to end recruitment process. Amongst other functionality, the platform allows for the tracking of hiring volume, time to hire, candidate source, open requirements, internal mobility and also tracks areas that could potentially ‘harm’ your workforce in the future such as diversity. Crucially, what the platform can do is uniform the process and provide transparent end to end talent acquisition data that can be used for reporting, forecasting and future proofing – What’s more, it is built on a web domain and so can be accessed by any stakeholders with access criteria from any location globally rather than being restricted by server access.

In addition to this, Pranav shared another new initiative being explored, ‘player cards’ for recruiters – these are essentially digital profiles for internal recruiters which show performance in real time against peers. This sort of initiative should help with accountability, improved performance, and again reveal key insights to support with career development, key performance indicators and ultimately a greater level of candidate experience.

Excellent stuff from Pranav et al at Adidas.

Ruth Penfold

For those who don’t know Ruthie, she heads up Global Talent Acquisition for Shazam and has been at the heart of Shazam’s talent acquisition pretty much since its inception, and was actually the first permanent Shazam employee who had a specific focus on recruitment and talent strategy. I have seen Ruthie speak a few times now, and as always I left feeling energised by her passion.

On this occasion Ruthie shared her personal account of entering Shazam and overcoming initial internal resistance to create a recruitment process, rolling out recruitment training, and then setting about developing an employer brand. Ruthie is also very much an advocate for the value of developing a personal brand and encourages her team to blog regularly where possible – Doing this, not only sells you as an individual, but also promotes your organisation and in this case the agreed shared central value for Shazam, ‘Deliver Magic Together, everyday’.

Baroness Karren Brady

‘Lady Brady’ closed the talks for Day 1 and did a fantastic job of both entertaining and inspiring the packed auditorium who gathered to hear her speak. Amongst personal anecdotes and tales of personal struggle and triumph within a male dominated industry, Karren gave her insights into leadership and what she feels are the 6 key ingredients for success.

To Karren, Leadership is about managing hearts and minds, communicating really well, and giving people passion. In order to do this it is important to establish a brand that means something to everyone who works there, as well as those who engage externally. This can be very difficult within a geographically and/or skill diverse workforce – one way Baroness Karren has set about doing this is by implementing ‘job swaps’ and life long learning initiatives. Even now, the players at West Ham work one day a month working in the ticket office to create a culture of understanding, shared values, and where everyone is thinking about how to make things better – not just in their role, but across the business.

Karren believes that it is essential to find something you enjoy, work out what your core values are and remain true to those principles throughout your career. Then apply her 6 key ingredients for success which are; 

• Leadership – become a true leader – ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy’ Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Ambition – You must identify and utilise your spark and fire, then use this to drive you forward
• Determination – A true relentlessness to pursue your goals and aspirations without taking a backwards step
• Attitude – Attitude is key, maintaining an attitude of collaboration, positivity, and belief will continue to push you towards success – a negative attitude will pull you backwards
• Direction – Know where you want to go, and be agile and determined enough to get there ‘the whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going’ James Allen.
• Positivity – In this respect positivity means hanging on when everyone else let’s go 

Day One Summary

I was disappointed not to get to more of the talks across day one, but of course was also enjoying being in the exhibition hall representing Hudson and having some fantastic conversations with delegates (and other exhibitors) – However I hope my highlights above do justice to the rich variety and depth of content on offer in day one.

If I was to take one thing away from the first day of the conference it would absolutely be the notion of creating and nurturing a culture of creativity and innovation. I am thrilled to see the move away from traditional team structures and siloed work functions, to the now more and more common ‘project’ style working where teams are established to tackle specific challenges and objectives based on their mindset as well as skillset – as Sir Ken made clear, creativity isn’t exclusive to the arts, and innovation shouldn’t be exclusive to specific individuals. We are all capable of innovation, now more than ever due to the support and augmentation of technology.

Conscious of length, I will post my takeaways from day 2 of the conference later in the week in a separate article – look out for that circa Wednesday.

Contact Me

If you would like discuss the event in more detail or would like to know more about Hudson’s Outsourced Solution offering, I would welcome you to get in touch with me directly - I would be happy to discuss any aspect with you further – 0207 187 6206 – [email protected]