
Fusion Days 2015 – Signs of digitalisation and automation.
Can IT and Marketing fuse into extra value for HR?
For tech company milch & zucker from Bad Nauheim, the answer is yes. At milch & zucker, fusion happens everyday. As the name (“milk & sugar”) suggests, solutions are developed every day from the two fields of IT and communications – even though they only appear to belong together at a second glance.With relevant employer branding strategies, tailored communication and efficient recruiting software, milch & zucker offers its customers diverse solutions for talent acquisition and talent management.
milch & zucker would like to maintain this charming balancing act between creativity and systematisation with its “Fusion Days” convention. The appeal of fusing fields and topics offers customers and interested parties (mostly from corporations and larger medium-sized companies) the chance to educate themselves on developments, trends and current events in the fields of HR-IT, employer branding and recruitment marketing, and to take a look outside of the box.

Fusion Days 2015 – A change of perspective in HR
And that is exactly what milch & zucker AG has invited people to do for the second time in November 2015 in Bad Nauheim. This year, thinking outside the box was mostly focused on automation and digitisation. Subjects like neuromarketing and search engine optimisation, however, were also included in the programme. The speakers were able to precisely connect these subjects to the world of HR.
To add further depth to Fusion Days, JobStairs – the Top Company Portal was present as a cooperation partner for the first time.
JobStairs is a job market, where more than 50 large businesses and their subsidiaries currently publish their vacancies. The partner companies are closely involved in the development of the job market. So, JobStairs invited its top companies to a yearly community meeting as part of Fusion Days. In addition to the community meeting, participants were able to make use of the platform to learn about current developments and trends in the field of HR
On both days Professor Dr. Wolfgang Jäger of DJM Consulting lead attendees through the programme in the name of JobStairs and milch & zucker. Furthermore, he presented the results of the “Human Resources on the Internet 2014/15” study. What is important to HR websites and the publishing of job ads, and which companies are leading in this field? These questions were explored in the study and the results were published exclusively in advance. Since January, the study has been available through book stores or as an e-book priced at 98.00€ incl. VAT through established German e-book shops.

A wide range of topics – A balancing act between theory and practice
Digitisation, automation, future technologies and industry 4.0 were the core topics of the one and a half day event. An introductory speech, two keynote speeches and six workshops offered a comprehensive overview, and the speakers who stemmed from non-HR fields provided participants variety and topics for discussion.
The keynote speeches by Dr. Roland Deinzer from the German Federal Employment Agency on “Mega trend working world 4.0: What rare the consequences for the labour market of the future?” and by Prof. Thomas Armbrüster from the Philipps University Marburg on “Authenticity as a fashionable utopia: The selection of personnel and talent management going astray” framed the event.
Dr. Deinzer covered a range of topics from the current refugee situation and their significance for the labour market to the changes in requirements of employers, and what that means for companies and employees.
Prof. Armbrüster, however, raised the question of whether recruiters are actually looking for authenticity when selecting personnel, or whether they are more interested in professionalism for their company. A question which, in the end, everyone had to answer for themselves.
Julie Linnert-Epple from the Robert Bosch GmbH had already opened Fusion Days on the previous evening with her introductory speech “Industry 4.0 – New Work – New Recruiting”. Julie Linnert-Epple is a senior expert on the topics of labour and social policies, data privacy and use of data, and industry 4.0 in the department for politics and government relations. She spoke about developments and changing demands using the example of the Robert Bosch GmbH, delivering an immediate link to everyday practice. Similarly focused on current practices was Dr. Folke Werner, head of recruitment marketing and recruiting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who in his talk presented successful talent relationship management using the example of PwC.
The presentation “Development of mobile apps in the field of HR” by Professor Dr. Stephan Böhm from the RheinMain University in Wiesbaden could also be directly applied to everyday work. Mobile recruiting is a topic that is becoming more and more interesting, offering a lot of potential to companies. This also applies to search engine optimisation for job ads. Christoph Baur from the CatbirdSeat agency offered a window into the world of Google, showing the hidden potential for job ads.
The presentation by Dr. Benny B. Briesemeister from the FU Berlin was a bit more abstract, but no less vivid when dealing with “Neuromarketing in recruiting: Recruitment marketing with brains”. A new perspective even for the experienced and renowned neuroscientist, who provided thought-provoking impulses with his remarks.

What is matching and how can it be used meaningfully in recruiting? Ingolf Teetz explained the terms and techniques of matching, semantics, neural networks and big data. He supported his claims with examples of possible applications in recruiting.
In international environments, matching will especially play an ever increasing role when it comes to providing comparability between educational achievements, job descriptions and other requirements. Ingolf Teetz will cover this topic again in depth during his expert session at the Personalmanagementkongress in Berlin on 30/06/16 at 10.30am.
The presentations for all speeches are also available for download on the “Fusion Days” event page www.milchundzucker.de/fusion-days.
In 2016, milch & zucker will again invite customers and interested parties to Fusion Days. This year, the fusion of different topics around the world of HR will take place on 19th and 20th September 2016 in Frankfurt. The programme is currently in development and will soon be published on the milch & zucker website, as well as through the various social media channels. Participants can definitely look forward to a few innovations. Primarily, the move to a new location.