Is Your HRTech Strategy a Sunflower or a Daisy?
A great mix of research and thought provoking articles in this week’s newsletter, with
- a new report from the Alan Turing Institute on the future of work
- some great analysis from Josh Bersin on how AI is impacting recruitment
- a botanical reference to HR tech strategy from Thomas Otter that somehow makes perfect sense!
Don’t forget that if you want to learn more about the impact of AI in HR, then you can download our primer on the topic, or see all of our latest research by going here.
Future of Work
Interesting article about how the focus of most companies has shifted away from making people more valuable and instead focuses on reducing costs (which often means reducing people or hiring people at lower costs). This becomes even more relevant as we move into a new age where we try to understand the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on jobs.
The author argues that one way of dealing with the future impact of automation is to move from a task-centred mindset to a people-centred mindset, where we shift our lens to consider how we can tailor jobs in a more effective way to drive innovation and redress the balance.
The Turing publishes new landscaping report on data science, AI and futures of work
The Turing has published a new report on “data science, artificial intelligence and the futures of work”. The research presents a review of existing literature on the future of work and has been commissioned to further data science and AI research to address real-world problems.
Lead author Sanna Ojanperä says: “Our report synthesises key findings about the future of work focusing on three main areas: broad research findings, emerging research directions and innovative data science research directions. While these changes affect economies and societies differently around the world, the challenges and opportunities give rise to research opportunities and open up avenues for collaboration and learning.”
AI in Recruitment
AI comes to recruiting: Will interviews go the way of the dinosaur?
A nice summary from Josh Bersin on some of the AI tools that are gaining traction in the Recruitment space, featuring Pymetrics, HireVue, Imbellus and Orderboard.ai among others, and focuses on why Josh sees real potential in this area for companies:
Of all the potential areas for AI and cognitive technology to add value to HR, this may be the biggest. While the technology is still young, success stories are now common, so I think it’s time for every company to make sure they have AI-based assessment on their list of things to do.
HRTech Strategy
Thomas Otter on owning your HR tech strategy
Thomas Otter has led product strategy at SAP SuccessFactors and worked as an analyst in HCM for Gartner before now striking out on his own. In this article, he shares some good insights and uses an interesting analogy to describe the way he thinks HR departments need to think through their HR tech strategies, especially in a world where we are seeing more startups entering the HR space every day:
If you take the case of a sunflower, what this means is you have a strong focus on one central vendor. It might be SAP, Oracle, Workday or whatever, but you have one vendor you turn to for your default solution. And you surround that large entity, where you use a lot of functionality, with small vendors … but you’re relying for 80% of your capability around that central vendor.
The daisy, on the other hand, is where you have a central vendor and you essentially use that for administrative record-keeping, and you rely more on the edge vendors, or niche vendors, for the majority of your innovation and the majority of your functionality.
VR & Gamification
How advancements in technology are impacting HR
Some good stats in this article around HR’s adoption of various types of technology and the appetite for adopting new technologies. Clearly when we’re still talking about HR moving to the cloud, it’s no wonder that adoption is slower for some of the new AI tools that are out there. It also highlights how VR and gamification are starting to become more prevalent in learning and development programs.
