AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CARROZZA, PROFESSIONAL RECRUITMENT
PRACTICE LEADER, WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING
How can you make dreams come true? Or transform a fantasy into a colorful, exciting
world that visitors can move through, touch, and enjoy? Such fabulous work is the daily
business of Walt Disney Imagineering, a core group of creative and highly skilled
professional wizards who combine imagination with engineering to create reality for
Disney Parks.
Progressive HR leaders are using the concept of “story” to build culture and engage
talent. Imagineering is, first and foremost across the globe, masterful in their form of
storytelling. We all have favorite memories that are so vivid from our Disney visits. It is
an experience for all the senses.
John Carrozza is a friend, former client and admired Talent Leader who learns from the
best Imagineers in the business and then gets to apply it to Talent Acquisition in a way
that he says, “supports his own growth and reflects his own creativity.” It is true that
John has incredible creative sides beyond work (love of indie filmmaking to name one)
but he has transformed his recruiting team from facilitators of a process to talent advisors
and strategists in a highly competitive and unique space.
John celebrated his 8th year with Disney this past month. I
remember meeting him just before joining the organization
and was so impressed with his passion for all things related
to talent and recruitment of the very best. Early on he was
responsible for many areas of corporate and enterprise
recruitment except for Disney’s Parks and Resorts
segment. Two years prior to joining Imagineering, he began
to express interest in the creative aspect of the business and
with leadership support, he navigated into Imagineering as
Professional Recruitment Practice Leader under a newly
created “Professional Recruitment Agency” model. This group is made up of
approximately 40 recruiters, sourcers, leaders and coordinators, with 7 of those folks on
John’s team who identify the unique highly skilled creative talent for new park offerings
or other leading edge experiential entertainment projects and research.
Sherry Benjamins: What are you most
proud of when reflecting on challenges in
your business?
John Carrozza: Changing MindsetsLeaders in this business have hired
through personal networks that have
served them well for a long time. I have
had to bring new strategies without
diminishing their own success in the
past. We have worked as thought
partners with an aim to “evolve” manager
thinking around how to identify and
develop talent today To stay on the
forefront, social media has been critical,
from Facebook and LinkedIn to personal
networking at industry events and
schools. The game changer however, has
been how we learned enough about our
business to consult with and “talent
advise” so that the hiring managers
previously reliant heavily on their own
networks now recognize the need for
building future pipelines, and open up to
our ability to enhance those networks with
new pipelines of talent and expanding
strategies on finding and engaging
tomorrow’s Imagineers.
SB: What makes this recruitment so
different than anything you have done
before?
JC: Hiring Imagineers is dependent upon
finding talent with a blend of state of the
art technology merged with the creating
“storytelling” sensibility and
competency. It is one thing to design a
ride experience and then another to build
one so that our guest experience includes
adventure and landscape supported by
amazing technology. Identifying this blend
makes the work very challenging and
what I have learned is that a resume or
certification is only the beginning of the
recruitment conversation – it takes peeling
of the layers to learn what a person is
really all about to determine if they are our
2012 FOCUS ON INNOVATION
Our newsletter this year will highlight
innovative change agents. We believe that
artists are catalysts for change. They bring
wonder, new language and ideas. So, we
plan to highlight this change by introducing
an artist in each newsletter. Enjoy.
This
virtual city nestled within the sprawling,
user-customizable Second Life online
multiplayer platform was created
by Chinese artist Cao Fei in 2007.
The RMB City skyline is an overwhelming,
seductive, and fantastical collage of
structures and activity sliding across a
scale from the uncannily surreal to
geopolitically poignant. Scanning your
eyes from the half sunken Bird’s Nest
Stadium to the oversized floating panda
bear in the crisp, digital blue sky, presents
a virtual living and breathing megalopolis,
ready to be explored by any curious
avatar.
Architectural landmarks from the East and
West are inverted, magnified, and set into
dynamic oscillation between real world
familiarty virtual world fantasy. For
Fei, RMB City is an ongoing, democratic,
and evolving experiment in role playing. It
is a playground for inquisitive virtual
travelers. Fei’s city tackles with great
imagination topics on changing identity
true storytellers.
SB: Was there a method to your plan?
JC: Our team is an integral part of support
aligned to the business. In order to build
credibility we needed to have knowledge
of future plans and the talent needed. We
are savvy on market supply and
technology trends. By the time a project is
conceptualized and then planned for build,
knowledge of technologies may have
already shifted so our pipelines need to be
dynamic as well as robust.
In order to be the talent advisor to our
managers we implemented three key
strategies. One was to build trust and
earn the respect of thought partnership
with the line managers. We modeled
these new behaviors by playing the
advising vs. “order taking” role. There was
a conscious effort to build pipelines of
talent in advance, using web 2.0 and new
sourcing channels rather than react to
requisitions. This required doing our
homework well before the open position
launch discussion.
Our approach to recruitment leveraged a
strategy of “huddles” as part of our own
learning experience. The team “huddles”
to play out scenarios with each other, with
other HR partners and sometimes other
Imagineers to exchange ideas and
strategies prior to meeting with clients.
Lastly, we are not shy in setting the
expectation that hiring managers need to
contribute and be open to a new process
of engaging talent. As thought partner, we
intentionally “ask” for their involvement
and clearly articulate what we need from
them as well as what we intend to
deliver. One example was, “may we prebook appointments for you” in order to
within an increasingly globalized world. It
is a digital space that continues to foster
participation by teasing at profound
relationships between the human and the
natural, the West and East, the past and
present.
For more info on Cao Fei and RMB
City: http://www.art21.org/artists/caofei
ensure candidates accelerate in the
process.
I know that John tackles his work with
great energy and when he is not there at
Disney Imagineering, he expresses his
passion in other ways. He raises rescued
mutts, loves indie filmmaking, classic sci-fi
and horror films, Hollywood history, 70’s
rock music, good “bad” movies and stays
balanced through yoga and veganism.
In summary, John believes that smart
companies will invest in teaching
recruiters talent advising skills. He also
pointed out the critical importance to “do
the right thing for those you don’t hire
today.” This is wise advice for all of us in
the people business