The Talent/Technology Balance

How HR Technologies Can Help You Get the Most From Your Talent

Steve Boese – April 2014

Presenter Info • Steve Boese • Co-Chair HR Technology Conference • HR Exec Magazine Technology Editor • Host of HR Happy Hour Show and Podcast • Blogger at Steve’s HR Tech • Your new best friend

There are two ways to think about the future.

One way is to plan for a future that will be only incrementally different and almost indistinguishable from the present.

The better, (and more interesting) way is to

envision a future that will be almost unrecognizable from today.

“The future will be new enough that we will be

uncomfortable, we will be unprepared.”

So what does that really mean for the HR/Talent professional?

It means new ways of working, new sources of

talent, and increasingly, new technologies that will make enable us to maximize our talent

investments.

Today, we’ll discuss how just a few of these technology trends and how they fit in your

HR/Talent programs.

And by the end of the hour you will think I am crazy, or that I just might be the sanest person you know

Agenda • Big Trends • CRM • Social Sourcing • Social Learning • Keys to making the best choices • Wrap-up, Q&A

Big Trends

<Believe the hype. Mostly.>

What’s happening in the workplace?

Multiple Generations at Work

Rapid pace of change

Technology adoption

Implications for HR/Talent • Workforce composition– Multi-generational workforces, aging

workforces in specific industries and skill types, regional labor market disparity, succession planning and knowledge transfer

• Talent scarcity– Who has a ‘hard to fill’ job open right now? Probably everyone. Tech, skilled trades, even entry-level roles in many fields are becoming difficult to source and fill. ‘Top’ talent always, always has options.

• Technology proficiency – Natives, immigrants, lurkers, holdouts, disengaged – all types of relationships with technology in the workforce

• Employee Development – Learning new skills and career development are primary concerns for the best talent.

It’s all about relationships

<Candidate relationships, I mean>

What is CRM? • Think “Salesforce.com” but for prospects, candidates, and

applicants • Search through and create talent pools, group and tag prospects,

keep activity logs, set reminders, collaborate on opportunities • Create specific and targeted messaging campaigns in support of

general outreach activities as well as specific recruitment initiatives

• Gain visibility and insights into candidate/applicant pipelines and flow, understand success rates of various marketing and outreach efforts

• Identify potential and emerging issues flow, supply, process effectiveness, and messaging strategies

• Think like a marketer, not like an order taker

How CRM empowers talent (and let’s you scale)

• Allows you to still be “personal” while scaling recruiting efforts

• Balances need to extend your internal resources to support an ever-growing number of prospects/candidates

• Helps meet heightened candidate experience expectations for personal touch

• Allows organization to look and think critically, objectively, and with data at their recruiting process and efforts

Social Sourcing

<You mean LinkedIn, right?>

Social Sourcing - Expanded

• Simple definition: Process of locating active and passive candidates via the use of social networks, platforms ,and communities for recruiting purposes.

• Initially, site-specific tools (like LinkedIn search) were the primary mechanism for talent identification

• But not everyone is on LinkedIn, (or Twitter or Facebook…) • Next generation set of technologies offer enhanced capabilities

to find, aggregate, and present consolidated “social talent profiles” that extend to numerous online outposts, (LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, GitHub, etc.)

• Additionally, tools now offer extended capability for social job sharing, social referral programs, opt-in talent communities, and targeted recruiting campaign micro-sites

Turning Social Data into Opportunity • Search: Consolidated profile

information saves enormous time for internal resources

• Assessment: Candidates who share content on sites like GitHub offer great insight into their ability

• Engagement: People spend more time on social networks than anywhere else online, social outreach and sourcing puts you where candidates reside

• Referrals: Leverage existing employees, alumni, candidates own social circles for leads

Learning Gets Social

<What happened to the book?>

Learning as a Social Process • All learning can be social: Imbue commonly accepted social

networking concepts into employee learning – sharing, commenting, co-creating, discovering, ranking and rating

• Mobile phenomenon: Everyone is carrying a personal computing device at all times – push content creation and consumption there

• Breaking down content: into more targeted and easier to consume pieces, moving away from ‘training’ as an event, to ‘learning/sharing’ as a continuous process

• Gaming culture: A generation of video gamers are now entering the workplace, collaboration in video games is amazing, tools are now leveraging gaming mechanics to encourage and support learning objectives

The Social Learning Opportunity • Ease of Use: Makes content

creation and sharing seamless and easy since it ‘feels like Facebook’

• Personalized: Using concepts like tagging, group creation, and featuring, each user’s experience is their own

• Democratizing: Enabling everyone to create content empowers and supports a culture of learning

• Collaboration: Embrace fast, easy collaboration to speed time to competency and productivity

Making the right choices

<believe me, you should>

HR Tech Rules of Thumb • There isn’t (yet) a “Yelp” for HR Technology : Be very careful of

motivations and biases of your research sources • User Experience is Important (and not universal) : What

constitutes great UX for one user will be ‘too simple’ for others

• It’s on the roadmap: Solution providers have to navigate a tricky balance between simplicity and capability. Ability to deliver new features is critical.

• Vendor viability is sometimes tough to measure: Factor in financials, investors, talent flows, industry presence

• Ecosystems matter: Systems Integrators, consultants, user groups, customer forums all impact your ability to implement, support, and get value from your HR tech investments

Five Closing Thoughts…

• Empowerment – HR Tech, especially ‘self-service’ HR Tech, has to be about empowering people, not transferring responsibility for task completion

• Simplicity – As we have become accustomed to our smart phones and single-purpose apps, thus HR tech needs to at least feel almost equally simple and targeted to help ensure adoption. No user guides, no hour-long training courses

• Personalized Data – Every user of HR Tech expects a personalized and intelligent experience. The tech should ‘know’ the user – what they are doing, what matters to them, and most importantly – how it will help them to do their job better. It should help them find the right questions to ask as well

• Flexibility – HR Tech solutions have to provide for and support myriad device access, multi-media content, widely varying user roles and preferences, regional and local requirements as well as being rigid enough to set and ensure overall organizational process needs.

• Agility– HR Tech solutions also have to be able to support sometimes rapid scaling up or down, integration with numerous and diverse corporate systems, and fit within an evolving overall organizational IT framework. The best systems will be open, adaptable, and able to fit new ways of working

To help get more from your HR Tech

One last thing… How do you get your HR organization and your leaders to think about HR technology

and people with a slightly longer view?

Don’t you forget about me… steveboese@gmail.com steveboese.squarespace.com HRTechConference.com hrhappyhour.net Twitter: @SteveBoese LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/steveboese