Out of a Dark Age, into a Renaissance — But is HR ready?
20 years ago, if you told a marketer that they could alter and optimize their campaigns after going live, they would have laughed at you. The internet turned the world of marketing on its head and provided endless new opportunities for reaching your target audience. Today, HR is on the cusp of a similar revolution.
There was an old joke in the marketing world before the internet: when you asked a customer “How did you hear about us” they responded in one of three ways:
- They don’t know
- They don’t know they don’t know
- They feel bad that they don’t know so they make up the first thing that comes to mind
The internet has changed almost every industry, but none so greatly as marketing. With the advent of the internet, a marketer can re-calibrate campaigns whilst they are live in order to test strategies to yield better results. They can target customers not just by demographics, but by their behaviors and interests. Whilst previously, marketing had been mostly about inspiration, gut and luck, the internet provided a trove of data that allowed KPIs to be linked to marketing activities creating a level of accountability that hitherto had not existed. The rise of internet marketing came with dozens of new specializations. Gone are the glory days of full-page adverts, TV commercials and billboard and in was Adwords, SEO, A/B testing, community management, content marketing and social media advertising.
As a manager, I can create campaigns to generate ‘brand awareness’ or track sales impact, I can run dozens of campaigns in parallel testing for the best results. This level of iteration, precision and feedback on progress towards goals completely revolutionized the world of marketing. With digital technologies, companies have transparency in how the dollars they spent returned yields to the business, and failures and successes could be tracked back to their point of origin. The benefits of marketing online were so obvious that businesses practically made the shift overnight. Today, of the 5 most valuable companies in the world two (Facebook and Alphabet/Google) derive almost all their revenues from online marketing.
The seismic shifts to marketing were so drastic it is hard not to ask yourself “was there life to marketing before the internet?” The internet was a Cambrian explosion for the world of marketing that still continues to grow with new channels, tactics and data points being made available every day. To be a marketer today is to be on the bleeding edge of technology, a hugely challenging but rewarding field compared to the stale, complacent industry it was before.
Whilst Marketing and indeed hundreds of other industries were revolutionized by the internet, some industries have barely been touched at all. Human Resources is a component of almost every company, yet has seen little change when it comes to the use of technology in the last two decades. As more and more companies realize that their most important asset is their people, HR is under an increasing amount of pressure to produce transparency and tangible ROI.
Today, a group of technologies have converged and produce radical transparency into HR results in real-time. Machine Learning is a field of computer science and mathematics that allows programs to personalize their recommendations to an individual, at scale. Instead of relying on broad assumptions about what motivates or deflates staff, or what strengthens or weakens them, these algorithms can learn all the nuances about a person and adapt in real-time to constantly provide feedback to HR departments on any number of issues. With so much of an employee’s job on computers today, data about their emotional engagement, performance and satisfaction is now quantifiable. Finally, breakthroughs in online data collection now allow for the gathering of emotional data, adding a new human dimension to data gathered through technology. All in all, the convergence of intelligent algorithms and digitization of work have led to an explosion in the amount of data available to HR practitioners.
HR roles are going to be increasingly technical
All this data will need to be cleaned, sorted and analyzed, which will require the digitization of HR departments. HR staff will need to learn how to sort through and analyze data to create actions and interventions to improve the overall health of their workforces. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to sort through and analyze data, and each of these analyses will produce unique insight into how better to manage human capital. In short, with the sudden influx of data, HR is going to evolve into a substantially technical profession.
Accountability will increase, with an emphasis on Return on Investment
Additionally, with more data will come more accountability. Standard processes will evolve in order to understand organizational HR performance. Questions relating to employee engagement, retention and performance will easily be traced back to their successes and failures and HR departments will be held accountable.
A large part of that accountability will be return on investment (ROI). Until today, HR has been the proverbial ‘invisible’ elephant in the room. Every company knows and understands that good HR are critical to company success, but nobody knows how to value or measure the outcomes. With new technologies, HR will be accountable for how it improves the handling of all employee affairs and more importantly, how it corrects problems to improve results. In this way, managers will be able to measure in dollar-terms how investments in HR departments pay off across the company.
Roles within HR departments will become more specialized
Better data will ease the process of tracking return on investment leading HR to become more specialized and ‘campaign oriented’, as happened with marketing. Instead of building strategy around cumbersome quarterly goals, HR departments will launch several campaigns of various timelines to solve specific HR problems. As HR becomes more campaign-oriented, we will see HR roles become increasingly specialized; for example, companies in the near future might have retention, skills development or engagement specialists.
HR will be more powerful than ever
With all this new data, HR professionals will be able to anticipate problems and act on them faster than ever. With the power of big data and analysis at their fingertips, HR will be able to predict workforce challenges and design intervention strategies before they even happen. Practitioners will have access to higher quality, first-hand information on how to manage and invest in their staff. With the advent of data, HR will move away from being purely an art to more of a science.
For HR professionals today, the disruption that the internet caused marketing departments across the world should be viewed as reason for both fear of great change and excitement for new opportunities. Professionals can choose to embrace the inevitable changes happening in their industry and be part of a technological revolution to massively improve the value and importance of HR, or they can fear and reject it. What is certain is that when these changes are fully realized, HR departments stand to become the most important part of any company, with the most agency and impact in improving overall business health.
This article was written by Christopher Schrader, CEO and Co-founder of Pathship, a company which is revolutionizing employee learning and development.
To find out more about how Pathship is leading change to HR practices, let’s chat
