We got to chatting about mutual acquaintances. She remembered me as one of the few English HR people who spoke Spanish! She was a close friend of the headhunter’s CEO, who had worked at one of the consultancies with her and, as she was in London to keynote at an HR convention, the CEO had invited her along. The CEO came to collect Pilar and whisk her off to her hotel, so we exchanged numbers and promised to catch up. I caught the last train home. Still Saturday 3.18 p.m. I collected Monday’s pre-booked rail tickets from the machine at the station. An independent college on the outskirts of Brighton needed a review on whether to buy an HR system or not, and, if yes, what were the best options? Mahira had rung me with this brief a couple of weeks ago, and I’d delayed
accepting as the US client looked imminent. In the event, I’d be heading there in the New Year, so I was free to pick this one up. Peter had been doing some organisational design and development work with them, so it made sense that the tech side came to us as well. Around 1500 students, 127 instructional and 261 non-instructional staff in 3 locations, shortly to be rationalised into 2 with the acquisition of a large space nearer the town centre. A Student Information System and other discrete software, but staff records on some cheap legacy system kept going by workarounds. The secret was going to be finding the right functionality for the right value – nothing new there! I always liked Brighton, so it should be an interesting trip. Now to catch up on paperwork! Christmas was coming….
introduction to the World of HR! Much better to harness AI to build work capacity, and, yes, all work was going to be changed, as the current models had been chugging along for over a hundred years. Peter left fairly early as his trains had been affected by overhead line damage earlier in the day, and I got into a discussion with the CEO of an airfreight company, the Head of Training for a large Telecoms multinational, the HR Director of a media company, and Pilar Gutierrez. I knew Pilar by reputation and had met her at events a couple of times. She was a Latina of Mexican heritage and based out of Los Angeles. Her background had been with two large consulting firms, and then she switched to head up HR in a major software company. I had heard that she had gone independent a while back and was very much in demand.
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ISSUE 19 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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