Tag: HR Tech

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4 tips for using technology to improve your internal communications strategy

How to use technology in your internal communications strategy

Summary

  • Strong internal communications help employees feel connected and engaged with company leadership.

  • Digital workplace communications are evolving — employees prefer strategies and platforms that help them collaborate with their coworkers and stay up-to-date with scheduling needs.

  • It’s possible to overwhelm your workers with too many pings and updates. Use technology efficiently in your internal comms plan.

An effective internal communications strategy is to your employees like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm: a beacon of light that they can follow even in the midst of unexpected obstacles and turbulence. They can stay focused on the task at hand to overcome any challenges and arrive safely back at port — or, in your company’s case, to seamlessly reach the goals you collectively set out to achieve.

But fragmented communications and radio silence from leadership can make employees feel lost and uninformed. They might not be prepared to face challenges head-on and effectively meet business needs. And, most importantly, they might lack the confidence and the desire to keep pushing forward if they feel like they’re not getting clear directions from company leadership. One study found that 85% of employees say they’re most motivated in their roles when management offers regular updates on company news.

Internal communication mistakes can also lead to low morale, reduced productivity, and increased employee turnover. If you’re using outdated communication methods or ignoring employee feedback about the way your organization communicates, you might already be suffering these consequences. 

And if you don’t have an internal communications plan at all, you’ll want to get one in place so your workers can receive regular insights from your senior management team, understand the company mission and goals, and send dynamic updates about their own availability. Because technology is the linchpin of internal comms in today’s digital-first working world, you’ll need to make sure you’re implementing these tools in your employee communication.

1. Offer a variety of communications channels

Some employees may feel comfortable asking questions over the phone or via a messaging tool, but others prefer to communicate face-to-face. The same truth holds for workplace conversations, from asking about your PTO or health care benefits to reporting harassment. Don’t assume that “young people” prefer digital communication and “older people” prefer in-person conversations. Employees don’t fit into cliched stereotypes like that, and some will need to have in-person conversations about certain topics. 

Still, digital, mobile-enabled communication is one of the key tools to keep an organization’s strategy from being outdated. For instance, in today’s hybrid, digital-first work environments, many employees prefer collaborative platforms to support their communication goals and needs. At least one-third of business users would choose Slack or Microsoft Teams over a traditional channel like email. And for hourly workers, dynamic, real-time communication is often needed to stay up-to-date on schedules and shift openings.

Give employees options, and make sure that one of the options is a communication tool that allows employees an easy, convenient way to reach out privately to their employer — and their teammates — at any time. Your communication tools should make it easy for workers to communicate with each other and their managers about shift changes, availability, task management, and other updates.

2. Consider how you will communicate in response to a crisis

Whether a natural disaster, PR mishap, or global pandemic, crises are a time when employers especially need an action plan to stay on top of internal communications. 

For example, with natural disasters like winter storms and hurricanes — which may disrupt an employee’s commute or comfort level of going into work at all — organizations can communicate with employees through corporate social media channels, mobile communication platforms, or even simple phone trees to keep everyone in the loop. For employees who have to work remotely following the aftermath of a storm or other crisis, workplace communication that keeps them updated on the facts and that shows sympathy for the struggles they’re going through will be appreciated. That’s important for managing your company culture through difficult times.

This is another situation in which internal communication tools will benefit employers and employees. Managers can give employees time-sensitive updates as soon as possible — and post them more frequently. Employees can reach out to their managers to ask about projects they’re working on and shifts they want to pick up to stay informed about quickly changing priorities and plans. 

It’s also really key to offer your workers the opportunity to give feedback about your crisis communications plan. Harvard Business Review writes, “Organizational leaders must communicate the channels available to offer feedback and should emphasize how much they care about hearing from employees at all levels.” Consider creating an anonymous channel for employees to leave their thoughts and make it clear that they can reach out to HR and their supervisor if they want to talk.

3. Keep remote teams engaged

Of course, even outside of pandemics or blizzards, it’s commonplace for employees to work remotely or hybrid. And more effort to communicate is required to help remote workers feel connected with the rest of the team. 

According to previous Workforce coverage, people are most engaged when their jobs provide them with a sense of autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Autonomy means they are able to work according to their own schedule and the way they like to work. There’s no micromanagement, provided deadlines and key performance indicators (KPIs) are met. Purpose means feeling that the work they do matters and that they’re aligned with the values of the organization. Mastery means performing high-quality work and improving every day.

This is a good thing for managers. They don’t need to overdo their digital communication with remote workers, lest they micromanage. Rather, what managers can do to engage remote workers is let them know what is expected and provide them with clear initiatives and timelines so they know what success looks like. Clear, direct communication is appreciated in this case, and an easy-to-use digital solution is an effective way to keep these conversations with remote workers going. 

4. Watch out for digital overload 

Employees must manage a steady stream of virtual messages, from emails to instant messages and pings from project management and shift scheduling apps. It’s easy to get bogged down by this never-ending flood of information. As helpful as technology can be in a good internal communications strategy, the possibility of overdoing it to the point where employees can’t check all their messages in a timely manner is very real.

Employees can work on their time management skills. That might mean shutting down their email or messaging apps while they work on time-consuming tasks to avoid getting distracted by a deluge of notifications. You could also create some type of request system so that people know when to come to them with tasks (or when notifications are muted for deep work), how much notice they need, and a timeframe to complete it. Your internal communication processes should be designed to inspire deeper collaboration and clear up basic questions instead of creating more.

Employers, meanwhile, can address this information overload by being strategic about how they share information and company announcements. Coordinating schedules and plans, sending out announcements, and receiving automatic updates on shift tasks can all be done through one workforce management platform. 

Keep messages brief by finding a digital tool that eliminates manual scheduling via phone calls and texts. Most importantly, listen to employee feedback if communication processes are getting overwhelming.

Take a collaborative approach to your corporate communications

It might seem natural to take a top-down approach to your internal communications strategy, dishing out company-wide news to employees in a weekly newsletter and soliciting feedback only in a quarterly survey. But true communication is a two-way street. As much as your employees need to hear from leadership about business goals, direction, and updates, company leaders should keep up to date with employees. 

What are their career aspirations? Are individuals and departments on track to reach business objectives? An effective IC strategy, powered by collaborative tools and practices, will enable you to listen to employees on key issues and measure their feedback. Together, you can work towards company goals, improve processes, and raise productivity.

Whether you have a mostly remote workforce or a storefront full of shift workers, Workforce.com can help. Its employee communications feature allows managers to share company or team announcements, send important documents, and give feedback to employees — all with the convenience of using your own mobile device.

Book a call today to find out more about how you can boost your workforce’s internal communication strategy.

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Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

astronaut with a magnifying glass

Summary

  • Requesting and collecting data in real-time allows your management to make better business decisions and keep costs low.

  • Focus on gathering insights that will ultimately address your business needs.

  • With labor analytics, variety is key. Use and collect data from multiple sources.

Data plays a vital function in all aspects of running a business. It is used in everything, from analyzing and predicting product performance to segmenting and understanding your customers in order to optimize the user experience. 

So naturally, data has an important role to play in workforce management through the process of labor analytics – also known as workforce analytics. Through labor analytics, HR professionals gather and analyze workforce data to:

  • Understand what new roles and functions a company should seek to fill and which ones it should cut. 
  • Understand what roles and functions might require a reduction or elimination altogether.
  • Forecasting the value and success a prospective employee can bring to a company.
  • Obtain actionable insights on how to better manage labor costs.
  • Gain a deeper understanding of the employee experience and what positively boosts employee engagement.
  • Optimize business strategy in a way that increases performance and productivity.
  • Make data-driven business decisions on fair and cost-effective worker compensation and incentives.

The good news is that most businesses already have access to massive amounts of workforce data – the catch is that gathering and making sense of this data can be tricky. But in the end, the benefit of utilizing labor analytics significantly outweighs the effort spent organizing the data. 

Research shows the positive impact that workforce analytics has on business outcomes. Case studies show that companies that use labor analytics say they have a clearer understanding of their workforce needs and can identify employees with high potential. They have also noted an improvement in retention rates and are generally happier with their human resources. 

Webinar: How to Stop Employee Turnover

Since the pandemic, attracting talent has never been trickier, and the benefits of labor analytics cannot be overstated. Following these four steps will help you optimize your labor analytics process and put your business in a better position for success.  

Gather analytics data in real-time

It is essential that your C-suite decision-makers have access to labor analytics in real-time, before they need to make critical business decisions. Visibility like this improves response time to frontline labor issues and ensures a more efficient allocation of resources. 

Real-time analytics give managers a clear picture of labor costs as a percentage of revenue across all locatins and throughout the day, allowing them to see where and when their workforce is struggling. This way, they can make better decisions regarding staffing levels, absenteeism, overtime, and more.

Whitepaper: Workforce Analytics

Connect labor analytics with business needs

While organizations should always make decisions on the most current data available, having too much data can hinder decision-making. Labor analysis shouldn’t be aimless in scope. Each research activity should address a specific question that needs answering by the organization. In other words, business outcomes need to guide the analytics process in the right direction.

Use multiple types of data and analytics

To best utilize data analytics, using multiple, targeted sources of data — including business-appropriate performance analytics and HR/talent management analytics — is important. But it’s not enough. In workforce analytics, variety is key.

Internal reports focus on metrics such as completed training hours or satisfaction with training. Predictive modeling uses statistical analysis to project the outcome of various actions. And external benchmarking allows an organization to compare itself against the industry-standard. Incorporating data from a variety of analytics types gives the business a more robust viewpoint, allowing for better-informed decision-making.

Avoid common data analytics mistakes 

Organizations should be sure to avoid common pitfalls when using analytics. The data needs to be organized and cleaned, and organizations should start with small, simple projects rather than something big to help get leadership buy-in. 

They should also be careful not to confuse correlation with causation in research results. For example, if data shows that older employees are more successful at a task than younger employees, that may have nothing to do with age demographics but with years of experience. 

Data literacy – “the ability to read, write, and communicate data in context” — is a vital skill for any business today, according to 2019 Gartner research. Some companies may still have ways to go to maximize the potential of their labor analytics. Hiring a chief data officer or data scientist or outsourcing analytics capabilities to a vendor can help make sense of the data that’s collected. 

The growing importance of data analytics is inevitable. For the unprepared company, this may be intimidating. Getting leadership buy-in and using data analytics strategically to achieve a specific business outcome can help. But once the organization gets a handle on its labor analytics function, it can expect promising business outcomes. 

Optimize your labor analytics process with Workforce.com

Utilizing labor analytics tools like Workforce.com makes it easier to turn your data into real-time, actionable insights. These insights help you more efficiently tackle frontline labor issues like:

  • Predicting future hiring requirements
  • Understanding current staffing needs
  • Managing compensation and overtime
  • Understanding and optimizing employee engagement

If you’re interested in using workforce management software to improve both your labor analytics and your bottom line, check out our webinar below featuring exclusive research from a Forrester TEI report:

Building a Business Case for WFM Software

For more information, get in touch with us now. 

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Workforce technology partners pair priorities with patience

headcount planning strategies

For organizations to choose the right workforce technology partners for their unique needs, the process isn’t quick and simple. 

Workforce experts explained the steps organizations can take to choose the best option for themselves. 

Also read: How technology can help your employee engagement strategy

Taking the initial steps to finding your workforce technology partner

To find the right workforce technology partners, the first step organizations must take is to define and identify their business requirements, said Karen Piercy, a partner in Mercer’s Philadelphia office. Also, they should define what the key user experience requirements are: 

  • How will users interact with it?
  • Is it mobile enough? 
  • Will HR be able to adapt to it? 

Another important factor is to consider the organization’s unique needs. When a company puts together its extensive list of requirements, generally speaking the large vendor solutions will already cover around 80 percent of them, Piercy said. Rather than focusing too much on these standard requirements, companies should spend more time considering their unique needs for their business and situation. 

“Carve out the critical things that are somewhat different and figure out how each solution will meet those needs. That will really help separate the marketplace,” she said.

Another area to consider is the service and support aspect of the vendor solution, she added. How does the vendor work with the organization on an ongoing basis after the partnership has been made? How do they handle problems, and how much do they let customers be involved in new technology or new functionalities that they’re in need of? 

Consider your unique needs 

Enterprises should go after partners that can accelerate their business goals, said Chris Bruce, co-founder and managing director of Thomsons Online Benefits. 

According to Thomsons’ research, 49 percent of organizations with fully centralized HR operations exceed their employee engagement targets. Meanwhile, only 33 percent of firms that have not fully centralized their HR operations have seen the same result. 

“By working with partners that can help businesses meet or exceed their goals, whatever they may be, they will be better positioned to thrive,” Bruce said. 

Common software customer concerns 

Most HR professionals are not intimately familiar with all the HR solutions available, Piercy said. There’s a lot of ongoing change in the marketplace including mergers, acquisitions and new technologies, and HR needs someone who understands what’s going on in the industry. 

Experts can help HR prioritize how they’ll evaluate vendors on everything from functionalities and features to user experience, she said.

“Companies often list a whole lot of requirements, and consultants know that 80 percent of them are standard functionality. So we don’t need to focus as much on that. It’s finding that 20 percent that are the things that not all technologies do well or that they might do very differently,” she added. “That role in helping pull out that 20 percent is very valuable, and helping them prioritize how they’ll evaluate the vendor.”

Questions for companies to consider include: What’s important to me? Is it mostly about user experience? Is it mostly about features and functionality? What’s the balance between these things for me? From there, these experts can help evaluate what vendors meet these needs and this balance the best.

While this is a best practice, many companies do not make decisions this way. The Workforce Business Intelligence Board’s “2020 HR State of the Industry Survey,” developed by Workforce.com’s research team, asked 809 survey respondents what their top three most important factors are for choosing a workforce management technology vendor. Unsurprisingly, 32.5 percent of respondents put “cost” in their top three. On the other hand, only 19.4 percent chose “ability to customize for our business needs.”

Experts can also help organizations compare costs for different vendors, Piercy said. Each vendor prices differently, which makes apple-to-apple comparisons more difficult, and certain experts can peel back these pricing models for the closest cost comparison possible. 

The longevity of the selection process

Organizations should expect the vendor selection process to take at least two to three months, Piercy said. “You don’t want to short-cut a lot of that process,” she said. “Also, once you’ve picked the technology, you need an implementation partner, so there’s another round of selection right there.”

headcount planning strategies

She advises that organizations start looking six months in advance and stay on task. 

A lot of organizations know how early they need to start, but where they falter is they start to lag after that initial start date, she said. Then suddenly they realize they’re going to have to rush the process in order to get everything done on time. 

Consider total cost of ownership

Once you have decided on the top vendor choices, that next step is to build the business case for leadership. 

While getting that apples-to-apples cost comparison is important, leadership needs more cost information before they make the vendor selection. They also want the total cost of ownership of the technology, Piercy said.

“Leadership is going to need to know the total cost of owning the technology. What’s the business case or ROI involved in that?” 

 

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Regulating recruiting amid constant technological innovations

recruiting, hiring, interviewing a candidate

As recruiters adopt advanced technologies in their quest to identify, court and hire candidates, attorneys are looking into the legal and regulatory issues those new tools may bring into play.

Lawyers, recruiting experts and technology vendors say legal teams are examining compliance concerns even as their colleagues in HR and IT evaluate products that leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovative approaches. Not only are they exploring the ramifications of privacy requirements such as Europe’s GDPR, they’re considering the possible impact of biases that may be inherent in a data set or unwittingly applied by algorithms.

recruiting, hiring, talent acquisition “I think we’re at the beginning of sorting out what all this means, but I think it’s definitely something people are thinking about,” said Jeffrey Bosley, San Francisco-based partner in the labor and employment practice of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “It’s a new technology and it’s evolving. Whenever you have a new technology, you do have growing pains and you do have these issues that come up,” he said.

Advanced technologies have gotten much attention recently, particularly as people inside and outside the business world consider the impact AI may have on jobs and livelihoods. At the same time, some well-intentioned efforts have generated media coverage for results that were diametrically opposed to what their developers set out to do.

In 2018, for example, Amazon abandoned an effort to build a machine-learning tool for recruiters after the system proved to be favoring men over women. According to Reuters, the tool downgraded resumes that included the word “women’s” as well as the graduates of two all-women’s colleges.

Also read: Is there room for an ethics code for tech companies?

Sources inside Amazon said the system, which had been under development since 2014, was meant to review resumes so recruiters could spend more time building candidate relationships and actually hiring people. It worked by comparing applicants against patterns found among resumes the company had received over a 10-year period. However, it didn’t account for the dominance of men in the technology workforce. As a result, the system machine-taught itself that male candidates were stronger than females.

Advanced technology “is at an awkward stage where it’s not really intelligent,” said William Tincup, president of the industry website RecruitingDaily.com. While he sees great potential for AI and other tools to streamline the work of recruiters and even address bias in the hiring process, he believes systems are limited in how much they can accomplish.

Why? In a word, people. “What are machines learning from their learning from humans?” Tincup asked. Hiring managers can’t help but operate with a number of possible preconceptions in their minds, from unconscious bias about race or gender to a preference for the candidate they most recently interviewed or who seems the most like themselves. Such biases, Tincup observed, live on in the makeup of a company’s existing workforce. And that leads to the troubles Amazon faced, where the data set reflects decisions made in the past more than it positions a process to understand needs of the future.

Technology Races Ahead

The situation is complicated by the idea that technology has outpaced legal and business practices. While they believe that will eventually change, analysts and technology vendors don’t see it changing quickly. 

“Right now, technology’s moving super-fast,” said Ankit Somani, co-founder of the talent acquisition and management platform AllyO, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. “Generally, regulators and the folks who control compliance standards don’t move so quickly. But, honestly, we’re like three lawsuits away from somebody taking it very seriously.”

Also read: Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. Here’s how HR leaders can properly wield it

 “Therein lies a real big rub,” Tincup said of regulation’s lag behind talent acquisition and HR practices. Nearly all of the processes involved with turning candidates into employees touch some kind of employment law or EEOC-related issues, but “all of those rules are outdated,” he said. “We’ve been working outside of the rules for 15 or 20 years. I would argue that there isn’t a company in the United States that’s 100 percent compliant from sourcing to outplacement.”

Talent acquisition teams, and HR in general, understand that and are beginning to adopt, said Brian Delle Donne, president of Talent Tech Labs, an industry analyst and consulting firm based in New York. However, he believes determining exactly how and where compliance fits in with the use of new technologies has been complicated by the way “artificial intelligence” has been “grossly generalized” in industry conversations.

“Most of the time they’re talking about machine learning, or sometimes just automated workflow processing,” Delle Donne said. “When you get into true artificial intelligence, where the machine is making decisions, it’s a higher threshold that’s required for our concern about the accuracy of [its] recommendations and predictions.” The distinction between true AI and what might be called “advanced technology” is important, he believes, because people assume that the machine is prescient when it’s usually not. “In most cases, it will be quite a while until machines are actually making decisions on their own,” Delle Donne observed.

Even in today’s state, the use of advanced technology has become widespread enough to raise concerns about whether it might, inadvertently, nudge an employer out of compliance. For example, AI-driven tools may use personal information in unplanned ways that a candidate hasn’t given permission for. That would raise privacy concerns. Or, tools might present results that, intentionally or not, run afoul of fair-employment legislation. “On both fronts, you’re talking about compliance statutory norms,” said Delle Donne.

AI’s Behavior

Such concerns, along with widespread speculation about AI’s impact, has made advanced technology “front of mind for many people,” said Bosley. In response, governments at all levels have begun generating “a patchwork” of laws that sometimes conflict with one another.

For example, Illinois’s Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act went into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The law sets out transparency and consent requirements for video interviews, as well as limits on who can view the interviews and how long they can be stored. However, Bosley said, the law’s mandate to destroy videos within 30 days may conflict with the preservation requirements of other state and federal laws, including in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Also read: How Will Staney continues to change the talent acquisition game

“It puts employers in a position where they’re really going to need to assess risk,” Bosley said. “They’re going to need to come up with creative solutions to try and work around some of this risk.” 

Not all employers may feel exposed in the near term, Tincup suggested. He estimates that each year only a handful of legal actions are taken because of a candidate’s unhappiness with the recruiting process. People practices, technology practices and civil and social discourse are “way ahead of employment law,” he explained. “So is this something that’s going to create an immense amount of risk? No.” Employers today, he believes, put themselves at more risk by hiring a salesperson with a history of sexual harassment. In that regard, “you could spend more money in risk mitigation … than in recruitment technology,” he said.

At the same time, an organization’s risk may be based on activities that aren’t related to recruiting or the workforce, Bosley points out. “This isn’t just a human resources issue anymore. It’s not only an employment law issue anymore. It’s much broader than that,” he said. “You have data protection, data compliance, privacy and the potential for disparate impact claims as opposed to disparate treatment claims.”

Bosley anticipates more claims will be filed that look into a database’s contents, what data’s being looked at, how it’s being processed and whether algorithms are static or refined over time. Essentially, these claims will examine how advanced technology is making its decisions. “It’s going to be something where human resources leaders are looking to involve others in the organization and make sure that they’re both issue-spotting and getting ahead of some of these compliance issues,” he said.

 Indeed, Somani believes this notion of “explainability” — laying out what a system does and how it’s doing it — will become more important in the realms of recruiting technology and compliance. “There should, in my mind, be more compliance standards around that,” he said.

Evolving Standards

Even at a basic level, compliance standards for using technology in recruiting “don’t exist,” Somani said. For example, does texting about a job opportunity constitute a form of marketing? Is such a text permissible if it’s personalized? Because the answer’s not clear, he believes many companies are putting stricter guidelines in place.

Somani also said legal departments are becoming more involved in the purchase and implementation of recruiting technology. For tools handling communications, such as those that facilitate SMS messaging between recruiters and candidates, they’re trying to anticipate issues by creating policies that cover not only privacy, but data collection and permissions. “It’s an explicit ask in almost every deal we go into: ‘If a consumer doesn’t want to interact with your system, how do you follow that?’ ” he said. When it comes to issues related to AI’s under-the-hood work, vendors focus on transparency and disclosure by presenting disclaimers on their product or within their privacy policies.  

 For enterprises, compliance issues “can be a deal-breaker,” said Megan Gimbar, the Holmdel, New Jersey-based product marketing manager for iCIMS Hiring Suite, at least at the corporate level. While compliance and consistency are important components of her product, she said, talent acquisition teams often shy away from the topic.

In the past, employers tried to ensure compliance through training. Their approach, said Delle Donne, was to make hiring managers aware of interview questions that shouldn’t be asked (such as inquiring whether a woman intended to have children) or information that shouldn’t be considered (the candidate’s age or ZIP code). “That’s a fairly low bar,” he observed.

The bar began getting higher “once we started saying algorithms are going to make that determination for us,” Delle Donne continued. “Algorithms might actually do a better job, [or] may actually be set up in a way that they might do a better job, than humans do at avoiding compliance issues through bias.” However, he said, that requires planning and a focus on non-discrimination features when algorithms are designed.

Also read: The ethics of AI in the workplace

Compliance Further Afield

The compliance issues raised by using AI in recruiting aren’t limited to talent acquisition alone. For one thing, Somandi notes, recruiters today leverage a variety of tools that were introduced into other functions. 

Think of how candidate management systems and customer management systems align. When using those technologies, compliance may involve adapting the standards used by marketing or sales so they can be applied to talent acquisition and HR.

That road goes both ways. Even solutions designed for recruiters raise issues that aren’t unique to hiring, Delle Donne said. “As HR tries to digitize, there are many, many places where technology can streamline processes and save time and perhaps be more beneficial to the employee or the party,” he said. Many, if not all, of those will lead to some kind of compliance question. For example, a bot used in benefits administration may build a profile of confidential medical information. Or, a learning program might enter performance scores into an employee record without informing the employee. That could be a problem if those scores impact a person’s future promotions or career path.

As it digitizes, the tools implemented by HR “will bring in these technologies and there’s going to have to be some focus or some attention given to not inadvertently creating bias or discrimination, or revealing private information,” Delle Donne said. “If you take a step back, it just could be like whack-a-mole. I mean, ‘Hey, we see it over here in talent acquisition. Let’s go chase that down and… Oh, wait. We just saw this going on over there.’”

Scheduling employees is one major HR task for which technology can help. Make more accurate, data-driven scheduling decisions in just a few clicks with Workforce.com’s comprehensive scheduling software.

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The future of recruiting technology

Sector-Report-RPOs-Do-More-Than-You-Think-8b38574

There are more open jobs than talent to fill them and companies are willing to try anything to win this war. That’s great news for recruiting technology firms that promise companies innovative solutions to find, engage and hire quality candidates.

Venture capitalists continue to court the recruiting tech sector, delivering yet another record-breaking year of investment. By the end of the third quarter of 2019, VCs had invested more than $4 billion in recruiting technology firms, and the industry was expected to cross $5 billion by the year’s end. Many of those investments went to recruiting platforms, including Jobvite, which received $200 million in February to acquire three new recruiting platforms for its portfolio; SmartRecruiter, which raised $50 million in May; and Fountain, a platform to hire gig and hourly workers that landed $23 million in October.

“The war for talent is not going away,” said Denise Moulton, vice president of HR and talent research at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting in Boston. However, companies are getting smarter about how they select and validate the impact of their recruiting technology.

“There are new solutions coming to market all the time,” she said. That is putting pressure on vendors to demonstrate value if they want clients to stick around.

Some companies need tools that will help them more effectively uncover passive candidates, figure out how to mine the former applicant pool and identify internal talent who might be perfect for a current opening. Others are more focused on automation tools to help them engage with candidates, conduct video recording or improve and track the candidate journey.

AI Is Finally Paying Off

Many of these tools now feature artificial intelligence to add to the value proposition. And that’s finally a good thing.

The industry has been talking about AI in recruiting for years, but the current generation of tools are actually making an impact, Moulton said. “AI is boosting productivity, helping to analyze candidate pools, and making it easier to keep track of people who you want to keep in your funnel,” she said.

The use of AI and automation is freeing recruiters to become advisers, focusing on building relationships and capturing data to track outcomes, said Jared Goralnick, group product manager for LinkedIn in San Francisco. “Analytics are helping them set realistic expectations about the size of the talent pool, and the ability to reach new talent.”

AI driven analytics are also reducing the time to fill key roles, and helping companies address diversity and inclusion goals. “These tools can be game changers,” Moulton said. Though as always they only work if you have the expertise to ask the right questions and enough data to generate meaningful unbiased analysis. “The more data you can feed (a system) the smarter it gets over time,” she said.

Skills Versus Experience

The other big trend in recruiting tech is the rising use of assessments, as companies look for ways to vet candidates’ skills and attitude, along with their qualifications and experience. “Assessments are critical if you want to build a funnel of candidates that will be relevant today and for the long term,” Moulton said.

Several vendors have acquired assessments companies, including SHL’s November purchase of Aspiring Minds, an AI-driven talent assessment and interviewing platform; Hired’s February acquisition of Py, an app that assesses candidates coding skills; and Mercer’s 2018 acquisition of Mettl, an India-based talent assessment firm.

And other firms are building their own assessments. Most notably, late last year LinkedIn launched its Skills Assessment feature, which lets users complete dozens of free skills assessments that they can add to their profiles. The early assessments focus primarily on technical skills, but the company plans to introduce soft skills and personality assessments over time.

“It will make it easier for candidates to highlight their skills, and for recruiters to filter their searches,” said Goralnick. It will also make the search process more relevant for candidates and companies. He noted that LinkedIn research shows 69 percent of professionals think their skills are more important than their college education, and 76 percent would like to be able to verify their skills as a way to stand out in a candidate pool. The assessments will help them do that, he said.

Moulton urged companies to be thoughtful about the technology they choose and to be sure it will add measurable value to the talent acquisition process.

“You can’t pick up every shiny new penny,” she said. “You have to figure out what your team will really use and how it will integrate into the workflow.”

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‘Harmonizing’ to Keep HR Technology Hitting the Same Note

Employee demand for consumer-like experiences, the increasing use of people analytics and the falling costs of hardware and software are dramatically driving the spread of HR technology. By 2025, the HR management systems market is expected to grow to $30 billion, more than doubling the $12.6 billion recorded in 2016, according to Grand View Research.

Faced with a mind-boggling array of solutions, encompassing everything from full talent-management suites to narrowly focused products that measure components of employee engagement, both technology vendors and customers are thinking more and more about “harmonization.”

In HR technology-speak, harmonization is the knitting together of products so users benefit from a single experience, as well as a data set that cuts across organizational and technical silos. The idea “is definitely something that’s become more prevalent,” said Jeremy Ames, president of Hive Tech HR, a Massachusetts-based HR technology consultant.

Ames believes it’s difficult for organizations to be served by one platform that does everything. At the same time, systems that aren’t properly connected will leave gaps in information and processes. Employers that aren’t careful are “going to have so many disjointed processes and experiences that it becomes a mess and a maintenance nightmare,” he said.

According to research by engagement platform provider Reward Gateway, 87 percent of HR professionals either want or are pursuing ways to integrate new tools into their existing ecosystem. Harmonization, said Will Tracz, the company’s chief technical architect, is about efficiency and creating a seamless employee journey.

“If you consider it from an IT perspective, there’s great pressure within organizations to save time and streamline,” he said. “You’ve got different systems at different parts of the journey, from an applicant tracking system that candidates come into, through to onboarding, to setting up communications to engage [employees] from platforms that sit alongside.”

First, Don’t Get in the Way

As a result, organizations are hunting for solutions that are effective, efficient and consistent, Tracz said. Most especially, HR doesn’t want to implement systems that get in the way of employees doing their job. Harmonization, Tracz said, is about providing a best-in-class experience while making it easy for HR to “seamlessly work through the life cycle without interrupting the employees’ days.”

Also read: Human Resources Technology Customers Insist on High-Touch Vendors

However, there’s more to harmonization than user experience. The information used by the system to provide self-service, reports and analytics must be brought together in a way that creates what data scientists call “a single source of truth.”

Traditionally, functions across the organization have relied on their own systems to get their work done. That can make analyzing data more difficult and reporting more prone to inconsistencies and errors.

For example, Ames said, dissecting data becomes more complex when 20 percent of it is drawn from the talent acquisition system, 30 percent from the learning management system and the remainder by the performance management platform.

“Sometimes that need to harmonize from a reporting standpoint is where the need to harmonize overall can start,” he said.

Core of Data Governance

That means harmonization is a data-​governance issue as well as a technical challenge, said David Ricciardi, president of data strategy and analytics firm Proximo.

On the back end, for example, simple data points like an employee’s email address and contact information must be consistent across systems. On the front end, a single vocabulary should be employed across user interfaces and reports, to the point where it’s even incorporated into PowerPoints presented to the CEO.

“That’s harmonization,” Ricciardi said. “They’re all on the same note. They all mean the exact same thing. They have the same sound, the same pitch.” For that to happen, every data point or term must be compiled into a business glossary, where every meaning is defined and every place it’s used is documented. “It’s a complex effort,” he said.

“Pretty much what you’ve got to do is work with the system of record, and when important events happen, have them synchronize between systems in as close to real time as possible,” Tracz said. In some cases, that may mean a weekly batch file update. In others, it’s enabling one system to reach out to others to let them know changes have been made. In either case, it also means reflecting changes as quickly as possible.

As important as the need for consistency might be, not everyone sees an industrywide wave rolling toward harmonization. A year ago, Ames “felt strongly” that harmonization was gaining momentum because many full-suite vendors weren’t paying close attention to narrower tools. Consequently, customers were tempted to pursue the best of all worlds, which required building mechanisms for different systems to speak to each other.

Today, however, “I think some of the biggest vendors are making more of an effort to make sure they’re not being bypassed,” Ames said. Full-suite vendors are trying to mitigate their risk by building new features themselves or acquiring them.

“There’s always going to be an appetite for both sides of it,” Ames said. “But right now I don’t feel a huge push in one direction or the other.”

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Could Video Interviewing Land You in Court?

HR tech, spy, monitor

Companies using artificial intelligence to assess video interviews should be aware of a new law on the books.

In May the Illinois Legislature unanimously passed the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, which requires employers to notify candidates that AI will be used to assess their interview, be able to explain what elements it will look for, and secure their consent to do it.

Those that don’t could face future litigation.

The legislation, which is expected to be signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker this summer, addresses the risk of hidden biases, explained Mark Girouard, a labor and employment attorney for Nilan Johnson Lewis in Minneapolis. “As with any use of AI in recruiting, this law come from concerns about how observations in the interview correlate to business value.”

Also read: Monitor Responsibly: How Employers Are Using Workplace Surveillance Devices

AI assessments of a video interview use machine-learning algorithms that are taught what to look for by studying existing data sets and finding correlations. For example, it might determine that candidates who use certain phrases, or speak at a certain speed, have the right attributes to do well in a role, based on data captured about previous high performers.

Replicating Bias

This is a valuable and efficient way to prescreen candidates, and it can potentially eliminate human bias from the process. However, if the data sets the algorithm learns from are inherently biased, the algorithm can adopt those biases perpetuating the problem, Girouard says. For example, they might identify certain word choices, facial expressions or even skin tone as a consistent theme among high performers, even though those features don’t align with performance.

“If algorithms are trained correctly they shouldn’t replicate bias,” Girouard says. “But if they aren’t they can amplify disadvantage.”

Kevin Parker, CEO of Hirevue, a video interviewing software company that offers AI-driven assessment services, couldn’t agree more.

“We are in full support of this bill,” said Parker, who was invited by lawmakers to provide feedback on its content. He sees it as another way to address privacy and fairness in the recruiting process, and to set quality standards for the entire industry.

Hirevue addresses concerns about bias by including organizational psychologists on the teams that work with customers to first identify interview questions that will uncover the right criteria for success (empathy, problem solving, sociability), then to test those questions against a broad set of data to ensure they have no adverse impact.

Sometimes a problem will emerge, he noted. For example, when companies train algorithms using performance data from a predominantly middle-aged white male employee population, certain factors can introduce bias.

The testing process used to vet the interview questions can identify these biases, then the team will either eliminate the question or reduce the value of factors associated with those measures. “In this way we can neutralize biases before a single candidate is interviewed.”

A Flood of Legislation

While this law has only been introduced in Illinois, it is likely the first of many such laws being proposed as concerns about AI’s impact on recruiting bias grows, Girouard warned. “It is the first drip of what is likely to be a flood of legislation.”

Also watch: Armen Berjikly on Communication Advances in AI

To protect themselves against later litigation, employers should educate themselves on what the law requires, and how they are addressing the risk of AI-driven bias in their current operations. He noted that most employers today can’t explain how the AI assessment works, what criteria they look for or how those criteria align with performance success.

That’s a problem, he said. The law doesn’t just require employers to inform candidates about the technology, they also must be able to describe how the AI tool will interpret the interview and how it will be used in the selection process. “If you can’t explain it, it will be very hard for you to defend it in court.”

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AI is coming — and HR is not prepared

AI in HR, artificial intelligence

The future of work will be driven by artificial intelligence, and HR is woefully ill equipped to make it happen — at least according to many reports about AI and HR.

IBM, PWC and Deloitte (among others) have all done surveys on AI’s impact on HR in the last 18 months, and the message is clear: companies want AI, but they don’t have the talent, leadership or confidence in their human resources team to make it happen.

IBM predicts that 120 million workers in the world’s 10 largest economies will need to be reskilled in the next few years to adapt to an AI-driven marketplace — and that if companies don’t get started soon they will quickly risk losing their competitive edge. Yet its “Unplug from the past” report found that just 28 percent of CHROs expect their enterprise to address changing workforce demographics with new strategies.

Even if companies are gearing up for an AI reskilling evolution, roughly half of their employees don’t think they can pull it off. A global study by Harris Insights in collaboration with IBM found that while more than 80 percent of employees in the U.S. and UK believe having AI skills will be a competitive advantage for their companies, 42 percent said they don’t believe their HR departments can execute it.

Deloitte’s “2018 Global Human Capital Trends” report showed a similar lack of confidence. It found that while 72 percent of respondents think adopting AI is important for their business, only 31 percent feel ready to address it. And research from PWC shows 63 percent of companies are rethinking the whole role of their human resources department in light of the impact AI will have on the business.

Part of the problem is HR’s historic lack of experience with data and analytics, said David Mallon, chief analyst for Bersin by Deloitte. “Every other part of the organization is accustomed to using data to support decisions, but not HR,” he said. “They lack data fluency.”

HR’s evolving role

But things need to change. If HR leaders want to stay relevant (and employed) they need to start thinking more strategically about their roles, said Chris Havrilla, VP of HR technology at Bersin by Deloitte. “They need to shift their mindset to be more data driven, and to see themselves as human teachers for the machine,” she said.

That starts with a change in culture, where data is used to make decisions about people in the same way other departments use data to track finances or manage the supply chain. “The notion that data should inform people decisions is new for a lot of companies,” she said.

HR also needs to think about how that data will help them reskill the workforce for an AI-driven future, said Amy Wright, managing partner of talent and transformation at IBM.

For example, HR leaders will have to reassess how they deliver training to employees and alert them to their own learning needs. “Employees are used to a personalized approach in their consumer lives and they want that in the workplace,” Wright said.

They don’t want to be given a list of full-length courses that may help them learn new skills. They want short, easy-to-consume learning nuggets that have been curated to teach them exactly what they need to know, when they need to know it. “AI-driven training platforms can deliver that personalization,” Wright said.

Also read: For Better or Worse, Artificial Intelligence for Talent Management Has Arrived

AI can also help HR to identify which employees might be best suited to be upskilled for new AI roles, to identify the actual skill gaps they have, and to customize a learning and development path based on others who’ve moved through the organization.

Do something

This transition won’t be easy. It will require HR leaders to upgrade their own skill sets while simultaneously upskilling their workforce and changing how the business functions.

It may sound overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be, according to Wright. The key is to get started. “Don’t feel like you have to build an entire AI roadmap and plan everything out. Just pick a business problem in one unit and pilot a solution,” she said.

Starting small will allow HR to either fail fast or prove the benefits of AI — and their own ability to leverage it — which will help them win over stakeholders and bolster the workforce’s confidence in their ability to navigate this digital transformation.

“HR can be the growth engine of the organization,” Wright said. They just have to prove they can get it done.

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5MM: Face-to-Face Meetings; HR Tech Show Recap

Workforce editors Rick Bell and Frank Kalman discuss a new study showing that holding face-to-face meetings with clients results in substantial amount of money in the form of new business. Also, some thoughts and takeaways from this year’s HR Technology & Exposition in Chicago; and what job tops the American Staffing Association’s most difficult positions to fill list? Hint: It’s not journalist …

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My Second HR Conference: Finally Getting the Hang of It

Andie Burjek, Working Well blog

I attended HR Tech this year in Chicago, and to a certain degree it was overwhelming — that is, there were so many companies and solutions it was hard to keep track until I’d had my morning coffee and then some. But throughout the meetings, interviews and lectures, I noticed a few key themes that just kept on coming up.

First of all: women in tech. The conference kicked off on Tuesday morning with four hours and four lectures on women in HR tech. The speakers mentioned unconscious bias in the workplace, expectation differences for men and women, and how when women are assertive it’s seen much differently than when men are assertive. Based on the reactions by women in the room and the whisper-comments people made to each other, this is obviously a reality for a lot of working women, especially in the tech sector.

Workforce‘s Rick Bell also commented on the theme of women in tech in his HR Tech blog: But I want to focus on one totally different angle. Rewind a few days: My friend calls me on the phone to give me very exciting news. Her company is sending her abroad for two weeks to work on a project. She made it clear this had nothing to do with that “lean in crap.”

(Note: I still don’t understand “lean in.” A dozen people have described it to me in very, very different ways. Media outlets either tout it as an effective strategy or as some classist dribble. I have too little interest in reading self-help books to read and interpret it myself. Anyway, this obviously came from a person who has one of those negative perceptions of leaning in.)

She could attribute it to something else, though: she asked. She emailed the team leader a while back. She said she was interested and would be willing to go even though it wasn’t technically her project. Out of the blue they contacted her a month later telling her she was going across the ocean.

At the HR Tech conference, the female leaders also echoed the importance of asking. If you don’t ask for something, you won’t get it. Good advice for women, of course, looking for opportunities to grow at work, but it can also be applied to anybody looking for an opportunity.

I also spoke with Caroline Turner, chief revenue officer of PowerToFly, a company launched in 2014 which connects talented women in tech to companies that value gender diversity and inclusion. She attended college as an athlete under Title IX, appreciated the equal opportunity this gave her and has that same passion for gender equality now in the workplace.

This conversation around diversity was very valuable, and one of the key points of interest for me was the importance of getting diverse talent in the door at the very beginning, when recruiting. Hiring people just because they’re diverse isn’t the best business move, but bringing in a pool of candidates who look different from each other can go a long way.

Second of all: rethinking recruiting. I noticed a lot of companies working in recruiting, and they’re looking to solve the same problem: how to hire the right people. But I liked the way Bob Schultz, general manager of the smarter workforce at IBM, described it in our interview. He mentioned the importance of taking a “holistic” approach to recruiting — that is, going beyond just past experience and the usual considerations. How about considering behavior and problem solving skills? IBM Watson has the capabilities to take the whole person into account in the recruiting process.

I liked the use of this word. Holistic. Just like companies are more often now taking a holistic approach to wellness (considering aspects like physical health, mental health, financial health, and beyond), apparently the same thing can be said about other business processes.