WASHINGTON DC – Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said at the Oracle HCM World conference on March 26 that the company’s strategy of hiring aggressively on college campuses is “unique” in an industry known more for poaching from their rivals, and will give Oracle a competitive advantage.
Hurd said hiring recent college graduates—rather than recruiting employees other companies don’t even try to retain—will infuse Oracle with more modern skills and enthusiasm. He maintained that the strategy is worth following even if so-called millennials are statistically less loyal and more interested in flexibility than traditional job perks such as pay raises and promotions.
“For us, it’s a chance to be different, it’s a chance to be unique, it’s a chance to lead—and we’re going to make that bet,” he said.
Hurd said Oracle’s goal is to identify and recruit the best possible talent and get them on board and assimilated within Oracle’s culture—a task that he said is not entirely on the shoulders of human resources.
Oracle has hired some 10,000 recent college grads in the past four years, Hurd said.
“It’s our job, it’s management’s job, to hire them, to assimilate them—it’s not HR’s job,” he said. “Our job is to give them an environment where they can flourish.”
He noted that companies in all industries face the same challenges of having to find talent in the midst of a generational shift. Baby boomers are retiring in droves, while millennials, who by 2020 will represent 50% of the workforce, are motivated by entirely different factors and have wildly different expectations for the workplace than preceding generations. “They will trade higher pay for greater flexibility,” Hurd said.
For a company the size of Oracle, this represents sifting through many tens of thousands of resumes, interviewing tens of thousands more, and then onboarding, assimilating, and subsequently retaining talent. HR leaders need technology to overcome these challenges.
But given the traditionally low place HR has on the list of IT priorities on the one hand, and on the other, the imperative for companies to compete effectively for talent, HR leaders will need to use cloud technology to advance their cause.
Hurd noted that most CEOs have a single-minded focus on revenue growth, which in turn dictates where IT directs most of its resources. The advantage of using cloud technology is that it provides business leaders with innovative means of meeting their specific goals in very short order.
Hurd said the average time it takes for a traditional human resource management system to be implemented is 14.6 months, compared with just 8.4 months for cloud computing. Most of the time spent launching an HR cloud application is in transferring and cleaning existing HR data, he said.
Moreover, cloud computing allows customers to benefit from new features as well as maintenance by the vendor. “You don’t have to go to IT for any of that. We do all the work and you get all the features,” he said.
According to Hurd, the end result is worth the effort. “It is so motivational for Oracle to have these kids come into the company. There is so much excitement in our company—new talent, new skills, and a different view of the world. And I think it’s very good for us. It changes everything,” he said.
That’s why “we’re going against the grain.”
