Breaking News: HRTechWorld has just announced a rebrand, to become Unleash! Read all about it here.Thousands of people were early to registration on day 1. Amongst the booming DJ in the entrance hall, you can find a masseuse and the #HRTechWorld creatures. What an awesome start to the day!We felt that Day One was a huge hit. Kicking off with an amazing keynote from Peter Hansen referring to his thoughts (and his book) on The Day After Tomorrow. Are we spending enough time and attention planning for the future instead of just for today? And finishing with the amazing Arianna Huffington. We need to be paying more attention to our “now”, and sleep more. It was such a treat hearing her do a keynote and then also listening to her fireside chat with Josh Bersin.Main themes for today were focused on the #futureofwork and how #HRTech can enable and support Talent Acquisition/Human Resources and culture and diversity.
She spoke on on Unruly’s 5 point checklist for Diversity: Measure, Find, Be Flexible, Nurture and Celebrate.Diversity is one of their strengths and their people (“The Unrulies”) live and breathe it. You can tell from their mission statement (“To unleash the collective power and difference of Unrulies to drive business impact”) all the way to how they work. We especially loved “Nurture”; One of the most important purchases they make for their offices is a good quality kitchen table, and they use it too! They actively encourage their people to bring their families in for lunches and to just hangout or check out the offices.Sarah finished with a favourite saying: “Good things come to those who don’t wait!”, we totally agree Sarah!
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Pictured from right to left: Urška Sršen (Co-Founder & CPO Bellabeat); Ida Tin Founder & CEO Clue; Brynne Kennedy CEO and Founder MOVE Guides; China Gorman Board Chair Universum Americas[/caption]
China chaired the panel of extraordinary female tech founders. Some key pieces of advice that they left us with: hire for company values and personality, and as a CEO you must be thinking at least three years into the future. But our favourite, by far, was that the most important attribute you should hire for is ‘self-awareness’. People who understand their strengths and weaknesses are able to be coached and to learn. We couldn’t agree more.
Arianna Huffington is a walking sound-bite machine! She tells us to focus on well-being and making sure we recharge our batteries. Stop living our lives through our phones and actually live them, experience the things around us rather than recording it.She’s not just talking the talk, she’s walking the walk. She has partnered with Samsung to create the Thrive App. It’s like an out of office for life, limiting the notifications so that you can go and live your life.Not only is Huffington trying to fix our personal life, but the way we work. She calls the company’s culture the ‘immune system’. If we get a virus or a disease it can spread. The ‘brilliant jerk’ is the poison for our company. A great culture is a strong immune system that can stop that virus dead.Of course, not many people leave work at work when they go home. We take who we are at home to work, and we take who we are at work to our homes. What does that look like? Life skills are just as important as job skills. If we help people transition through their lives, it will teach resilience and beyond job skills, it will establish real life skills.She finishes by reminding us that this is our one and precious life:
“Bring as much joy, as much humanity and as much gratitude as we can. Let’s not just say upward and onward, let’s just say upward, onward and inward. Just take a breath and connect with it.”
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Ariana Huffington rocking the stage[/caption]
We were part of a speed conferencing session today focusing on Hard Skills and Soft Skills for the future of work.We started by sitting on the floor to warm up in an informal way then got into some speed networking. We were one of six speakers. Topics that were covered were Chat Bots in the recruitment process, using inbound marketing, enabling culture when scaling, the shift from hard skills to soft skills we’ll need in the future, micro-learning and how to buy HRTech. One of my favourite discussions was on whether Talent Acquisition should move into the marketing department. Definite food for thought.
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The MASSIVE expo hall[/caption]The expo hall is massive: so much great HRTech, we’ve tried to summarise some of our highlights, but the whole day has become a massive whirlwind of excitement!IBM's Watson used our Twitter profiles to tell us what our personality type was (Dale - Adventurous, Simon - Visionary).[caption id="attachment_8688" align="alignleft" width="360"]
Watson's predictions for Dale & Simon[/caption]BeeKeeper - An employee communication app that we got a rave customer review about. It enables secure communication between employees and teams. The customer stated that it has increased active engagement and productivity across the entire company.Devscore - Cool product that simplifies developer acquisition and assessment. And the founder Peter Cummings is worth having a beer with.So excited for our friends at Enboarder who were runners up in the startup competition from a lineup of over 25, but Robot Vera were the overall winners - They are using AI to replace 90% of the recruitment process. They find the candidates online, make contact and then a robot will phone them before forwarding a shortlist to the recruiter. Hmm, we’re not sure on this one. Really takes the human element right out of it.Hot tip: Keep hydrated - Get a free water bottle from one of the vendors in the expo hall and fill it up at the water filters.
