During my career, there were several innovative projects that I was responsible for, and all of them started with the opening of the Mirage. I’ll use this week’s 5 quotes and messages to tell the story of the 14 years it took to fully realize my vision for a paperless HR department. I’ll do the same with other projects when the theme of Innovation cycles back around in the future.
We spent 16 months designing and developing the end-to-end recruitment process for the opening of the Mirage – it was comprehensive, complex, and multi-faceted. Bobby Baldwin was the President of the Mirage and the attention to detail that he instilled in us was extensive and legendary. The office set-up and flow were meticulously designed to make the process unique, exciting, and indicative of the kind of service we wanted to instill in our employees. In so many ways it worked beyond our expectations (stories for another time), but I’ll start this week of connected messages by talking about what happened when, behind the scenes (and out of view), we struggled with transcribing and storing the data – both the volume and its accuracy – from the more than 55,000 applications we received in less than 2 months. We couldn’t read a lot of the handwriting on the applications and, even when we could, found that more than 17% of the data input into the nascent word processing systems available at that time was inaccurate; this led to the mis-filing of lots of paper applications and ultimately resulted in our having to ask more than 10% of applicants to fill out duplicate applications each time they returned for subsequent interviews. HR’s customers – applicants and hiring managers, let us know of their unhappiness with this and that planted the seeds of innovative thinking that began to germinate during post-opening debriefs and reviews. To the outside world, the opening of the Mirage was a monumental success in so many ways. But to us, it was the genesis of thinking about how we could do it better. Success is an iterative process, and you can’t let accolades received along the way get in the way of continuous learning and improvement. Listen to your customers to learn what you need to learn today.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft. Source: Business @ the Speed of Thought
Tomorrow: Treasure Island and the advent and lesson of scanning.
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