Preliminary Interviews
Millennial Workers
In order to validate some of the information obtained from background literature research on millennials, we started conducting informal interviews with individuals of the generation. One particular millennial we talked to seems to have what some would consider the ‘ideal’ job for millennials. He worked as a designer in a small video game development company. He described his work environment as very informal, and enjoyed the benefit of very flexible work hours. In particular, the interviewee explained that “my company is big on the idea that you are there for eight hours but they aren’t necessarily getting eight hours of solid work there. They expect a certain degree of keeping your mental health by talking to people [socially]. They know your real life doesn’t stop [when you are at work].” The interviewee continued to explain how he had been encouraged since day one to download and install any instant messaging client he liked, as well as even download and play video games (which is a little more understandable if you consider that his company is in the video game industry).
It is clear that this interviewee enjoys a very casual atmosphere at work, where the dress code is loose and corporate hierarchy is minimized, if not completely ignored. The interviewee explained his relationship with his manager, saying that “he considers me an equal in a lot of ways in terms of the design process and questions of design.” The interviewee seemed to really value this aspect of his job. He realized that it was the informal relationship with his manager that really afforded him the flexibility of his current work environment that he enjoyed so much.
It was intriguing to probe what it was about this work environment that suited the millennial so well. Although the work atmosphere described by our interviewee is different from the corporate environment that our client is targeting, it serves as a good comparison with the more formal environments where most of our contextual inquiries were conducted.
Human Resources
In many companies, particularly those of a smaller size, HCM tasks are relegated to the HR department as they are involved with the basic operations of employee management (though in larger companies these duties can be shared with the individual managerial units). We thus wanted to conduct observations with HR personnel in order to gain a better understanding of their role within HCM. We were able to speak with a receptionist working in the HR department of a small private university, who uses a module of Kenexa (a competitor’s talent management solution) in her daily work.
Besides her basic responsibilities as a receptionist, our interviewee’s responsibilities include gathering monthly hiring statistics for staffing services and posting open job postings to hiring websites such as the university's internal hiring site and Monster.com. She uses Kenexa’s recruiting module to gather statistics data and also to look up job descriptions that must be used in the job postings, which she must reformat to be able to post them on external hiring websites. She said that she “used a talent management system” regularly, but upon further interviewing, we learned that her responsibilities were confined to a very limited section of the recruiting module.
Findings
The findings of our preliminary interviews and additional background research were consolidated into an interests model. More information on the interests model can be found on the findings page.
