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Review: "Swarms,
Smart Mobs and Mickey Mouse – the CIPD Conference 2007" by
Catherine Price
A
competition run by my local branch of the CIPD to win a free
ticket to this year’s conference gave me my first
ever
chance to attend the annual Harrogate event.
As a recruitment and assessment specialist, I had been particularly
keen to go to the first session, “A Process and Strategy for
C21
Recruitment”, and I was not disappointed. Donna Miller,
European
HR Director of Enterprise
Rent-A-Car,
described how the company had expanded into the UK from its home in the
US and how it had set about building its recruitment brand and
processes so that it is now the largest recruiter of graduates in the
UK.
Donna was followed by another big recruiter of graduates, Keith
Dugdale, Director of Global Recruitment at KPMG.
Keith talked about the innovations KPMG had made to overcome
undergraduates’ negative perceptions of accountancy and to
compete for talent with their main rivals. Innovations included
“invading” student space with a
“pod” (actually
a tent!), which they moved from campus to campus and pitched outside
student union buildings. They had followed this by moving into
students’ “virtual space” with
invitations to
interview on social sites like FaceBook.
This year, KPMG will be moving into “cyberspace”
with the offer of an interview in the virtual world of Second Life,
where students and others adopt virtual alter egos and you are likely
to find yourself interviewing yellow blobs with tentacles or mermaids
in tuxedos. I regret I neglected to ask how the KPMG interviewers were
planning to present themselves!
The impact on HR of new types of social interaction also featured in a
fascinating presentation by Lisbeth
Claus of Willamette
University
in Oregon, who talked about the increasing globalisation of HR. She
used the term “swarms” to describe the sort of
social
phenomena – increasingly fuelled by the Internet –
in which
everyone is suddenly talking about the same thing, using the same slang
or playing the same game. It is hard to pinpoint where a movement
starts but, if you are a business, it pays to have some of your
products or services – or your recruitment brand –
taken up
by a “swarm”. “Smart mobs” are
essentially
“swarms” with technology – mobiles or
PDAs at the
moment, but who knows what in the future? Lisbeth talked
about
the options for using technology to promote more open and collective
ways of working, citing the example of a company that had written its
employee manual in “open source” – like Wikipedia
– with everyone who had knowledge of particular areas having
a
chance to contribute. The result was that the new manual was ready in
two days.
I went to several other excellent seminars. John
Boudreau of the University
of Southern California
talked about the application of “decision science”
to HR.
In a world of constrained resources, Professor Boudreau argued, it
makes sense to target your money and effort where it will make the
biggest difference. He presented a case study from the Disney
organisation which showed that you could make a much greater positive
impact on visitors’ experience by improving the training you
offered to “sweepers” than you could by investing
the same
effort in Mickey Mouse. (See Strategic Human Resource Management Measures:
Key Linkages and the PeopleVantage Model, p.10f)
In some ways, the best session was that led by Professor Phil
Rosenzweig of IMD,
who talked about the Halo (and
Horns) Effect,
a perennial problem for those of us working in assessment. He
demonstrated the shakiness of the research base on which much modern
management thinking is based in a talk that was both entertaining and
clear-sighted. I and others were deeply impressed by his quiet
determination not to be taken in by overblown theories based on dodgy
data. I even queued afterwards to buy an autographed copy of Professor
Rosenzweig’s book (my only purchase of the
conference!).
Inevitably, in a two-and-a-half day conference, not every session was
compelling. I thought that Greg Dyke and Gerry Robinson were rather
wasted as keynote speakers. They were interviewed together by Jeremy
Paxman which, disappointingly, reduced much of what they each said to
anecdote and sound-bite. It was entertaining, but not necessarily
enlightening.
Overall, though, I
had a very
enjoyable and thought-provoking two-and-a-half days and I got to listen
to some world-class speakers whom I would never otherwise have been
able to hear. My thanks to the Branch for giving me this very valuable
development opportunity.
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"Catherine
Price is a first rate professional, very knowledgeable and highly
credible with both clients and candidates."
Phil
Griffiths,
The
Connect Team Ltd
"We decided to ask
the advice
of a local recruitment consultant, Catherine Price, of The Moor House
Fellowship... This saved us time because she helped us to focus on what
needed to be done... We gained expert advice and a tailor-made
assessment process."
Dr
Martyn Hewett,
writing in
GP Newspaper,
11 August 2006 |
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