Is It Time for the Next Wave of HR Tech Consolidation?
It feels like the last few weeks have seen the large HR software vendors start to try to catch up with the innovation that has been happening over the last couple of years in the startup world.
Not only have we seen LinkedIn acquiring companies (Glint) and adding functionality (ATS, Talent Insights) to its product offering but now companies like Workday and Oracle are starting to add functionality that has been getting traction in the startup space. We’ve seen this happen several times before (as best described in Josh Bersin’s excellent piece in Forbes from 2016), but it does feel as though the next wave of HR tech consolidation is now really starting to accelerate.
Some of the highlight’s for this week’s newsletter include:
- A great read on the Future of Work from Naomi Climer
- Several articles continuing the discussion of AI and bias in Recruitment
- New research from Randstad Sourceright on Talent Trends
Preparing Workers for Automation
How leaders can prepare for AI in the workplace
Interesting article that looks at the importance of continuous learning and development as businesses examine how AI and automation will impact workflows and tasks within jobs. This is an area where HR can really start to add value, in helping businesses understand the skills that they have in place today and where skill gaps can be bridged with training or by adapting hiring strategies. It is also good to see an increase in references to the “soft skills” or non-technical skills that will be needed to help with advances in technology in the workplace (as also highlighted by Jeff Weiner recently). This is highlighted further by this quote from Laurie Paduaat Alexander Mann Solutions:
HR strategists must become accustomed to upskilling existing teams and planning future workforces with robots in mind, the roles of real-life employees will develop so that we will work alongside robots to become more efficient and productive, and innately human traits will become more valuable than ever.
Chatbots on the Rise
Oracle launches digital assistant that can integrate multiple apps
In a move that we have seen happening in the startup world, where companies are increasingly looking at how chatbots can be used as a conversational interface that helps hide some of the clunkier features of enterprise systems, Oracle has unveiled its new Oracle Digital Assistant. It is an AI-powered chatbot that companies can use to build their own personalised virtual assistants with conversational interfaces and built-in machine learning to understand interactions.
The assistant can unify different domain skills from multiple applications including HR, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience (CX) rather than serving a single purpose as is typically the case with chatbots.
It will be interesting to see if taking the Oracle chatbot offers any greater functionality than if an organisation decides to go with one of the many best of breed solutions that already exist in this space.
Future of Work
Naomi Climer on the Future of Good Work
An excellent read, where Naomi Climer presents her view on the need to refocus our efforts on the design and dispersal of technology — or ‘co-bots’ — that enhance human work. She outlines an increasingly urgent need for new thinking about the most appropriate policy architecture to support a “people first” approach to navigate through the technological revolution, shaping a future in which innovation, social justice and individual development grow together.
Naomi describes a desire to put human development at the centre of automation and a focus on reskilling employees. She also suggests that governments should make good work a core objective of social and economic policy-making and industrial strategy, that they should rethink life-long learning and support for people, and that education institutions need to work with business, as well as government, to develop better and more accessible pathways for training at different points in people’s career cycles.
Talent Trends
Michel Stokvis (MD of the Randstad Sourceright Talent Innovation Center) takes a look at the latest findings from the Randstad Sourceright 2018 Talent Trends research and examines how innovation in technology is impacting recruitment. While technology is changing how businesses acquire talent, it’s also the great equaliser — competitors will have access to similar, if not the same, tools. This means technology alone won’t provide an edge, but how organisations use it to accelerate people will.
Tasks such as candidate database search (51 percent), tracking HR data/metrics (51 percent), the creation and management of HR analytics (51 percent), and the initial screening of candidates (49 percent) are the top four areas that talent leaders say should be mostly or completely automated.
AI in Recruitment
Three good reasons to utilise AI over traditional recruitment methods
Charlotte Souter from Cognisess provides an interesting perspective on the ongoing debate triggered by the news a few weeks ago that Amazon ditched their AI screening tool due to gender bias. Charlotte promotes the importance of looking beyond candidate CVs when using technology to select talent and why tests that focus on understanding ability and skills are a much better way of using AI for recruitment.
She argues that companies should consider using technology to assess as many attributes as possible in the recruitment process and use AI/algorithms to help inform companies make balanced and informed decisions.
Workplace Harassment
Spot launches workplace harassment bot for internal company use
Conversational AI startup Spot has announced that its anonymous sexual harassment reporting bot for the workplace can now be adopted by businesses. The Spot bot uses conversational AI and a cognitive interviewing method to collect information about incidents of workplace harassment. Individuals who experience harassment simply log their experiences in the bot, which then generates a report that can then be handed over to an employer.
This a really simple use of a chatbot to capture key experiences at the point that they happen, that can either be submitted immediately or time-stamped to be referenced later if an employee wishes to pursue the matter further at a later stage, particularly if the harassment issue is ongoing or escalates.
People Analytics
Workday BrandVoice: announcing Workday People Analytics
Workday has launched Workday People Analytics — a new application that will give customers a view into the most critical trends in their workforce, and an understanding of the most likely drivers of those trends. It leverages AI, machine learning, and augmented analytics technologies to provide key metrics accompanied by explanatory narratives or “stories”.
It will be interesting to see how much of this functionality is different to what companies are already able to get via tools such as Visier and OneModel or from expertise within their People Analytics teams. One of the most common complaints from Workday customers is that they need other data analysis and management tools to augment its built-in capabilities, so this is clearly a move from the company to address that.
Consumerisation of HR
Demand for both digital and human-based experience
Great article from Soumyasanto Sen on the shift to make HR technology more aligned to the experiences that people get in their consumer lives and how technology is impacting the workplace. PWC’s latest Consumer Intelligence Report shows that almost half (43–55)% of workers prefer digital interactions for common HR Tasks such as scheduling vacation time, getting IT help or updating personal information, but that there are still many areas where workers prefer human interactions over digital.
Soumyasanto’s article illustrates that the workforce wants new ways of working and an employee experience that offers digital access, personalisation and effectiveness, but we’re still a long way away from creating an exceptional digital experience for employees.
