Why is personalization so important in HR
On December 1–4 Winter Island 2019 took place in Sochi. Winter Island is the intensive course for Russian startups, educational institutions, government authorities and big businesses, interested in development of digital economy. The conference hosted a workshop from world leading HR specialists — Director of the HR Trend Institute Tom Haak and founder of the very first (1994) web-based HR tools (PiCompany) Peter van der Bel. They spoke on how personalization is being applied in different spheres, such as finances, retail, everyday life, household, relationships and, of course, HR. Workshop participants discussed digital behavior, confidentiality issues and many other questions.
Interviewer: You had a workshop on Winter Island. What did you discuss with the participants?
Peter: Basically, we talked about customization and personalization and the difference between the two of them.
Tom: Personalization is all around whether you are willing and able to take individual capabilities and preferences of people into account. You can use data for that, generally hard data like “Where do you live?”, “How old are you?”, “What do you earn?”, but also soft data, for example, personality. The more we know about you, the better we are able to tailor what we offer to you, based on your preferences, your profile.
Peter: So we gave some examples of that. Two examples more or less in the HR arena, so people who get instructed to learn prior to going to, for example, assist in operations. Say, you’re a nurse you go to an operation and then the system says: ok, this is the basic checklist, you can just answer all the questions and if the questions are all right then you can proceed. And if you miss a few questions then you’re given a little video outlining what procedure was about.
And we also spoke about applying personalization in the financial market. For example, when people overspend, we provide them with feedback on how to save money, but only on expenses that are easiest to save money on, not only based on the financials, but of who they are, their profile, their personality.
Tom: And we also enabled people to make their Personal User Guides — that was the core of the workshop. So they did a little personality test and the outcome was the Personal User Guide. If you have my Personal User Guide, you can say how to deal with me, Tom, in the best way. And if I have yours, then we can interact a lot better. The participants made their Personal User Guides and can take them home.
Int: Well, what questions did the participants ask you, what information did they want to get?
Peter: I gave an example on saving money on the basis of personality and I only used one personality aspect instead of all five, the Big five. The question was: do you only use one aspect or do you use all five aspects?. Clearly people were aware of what was going on and obviously I told them that this was just for the sake of the example, but in reality we use all the five personality traits.
Tom: And people wanted more examples in the HR domain. We talked for example about recruitment. You can make the best fits between recruiters and candidates. Because what is the best fit? If you know something about the personality of the candidate, you can try to find the best fits with that personality. There are really practical applications in the HR domain.
The second example is in the learning domain. If we know, how you like to learn and how you learn in the best possible way, we can offer you learning solutions that fit with you. Some people really like to read books, other people are more visual, other people have short attention span.
Peter: So we match the styles of learning, as a matter of fact.
Int: And what advice could you give to the participants of the Island?
Tom: Well, one is to use data, and do not rely too much on your gut feel but rely on data and try to make a combination of hard data and soft data. The more data you have from different sources the better you can make solid decisions. So that’s one big advice.
The second one. Do not make things too much “one size fits all”, say “all right, this is what everybody is going to do”. That’s not going to work. Better try to personalize, that is an important message based on the data, the key message. And personality is a valuable parameter to know about and you can use it quite easily.
Peter: Maybe the last thing is that, adding to what Tom says, if you’re going to make use of psychological constructs, like for example, “personality” make sure you use the models that have a solid scientific foundation. Well, that’s basically what we tried to get across.
