The Future Of HR In the Age Of Information And Data Some interesting technology trends are emerging across the entire employee lifecycle of an organization to redefine the future of HR
By Ajay Trehan
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COVID-19-led disruption has changed HR at a fundamental level. The incredible pace of tech and data adoption and digital transformation across organisations of all sizes points that HR is striving harder than ever to be a strategic partner that is essential to the core business. In KPMG's Future of HR 2020 Survey, three in five HR leaders reported they feared irrelevance if the HR function doesn't modernize itself. Consequently, some interesting technology trends are emerging across the entire employee lifecycle of an organization to redefine the future of HR.
Employee Lifecycle and the Emerging HR Tech Trends
Sourcing: AI can process billions of pages of data in a single day. Since human effort cannot even come close, AI gives a definitive advantage to recruiters who need to source and engage multiple candidates, especially passive ones. The general belief among sceptics is that AI-driven sourcing platforms are not as quality driven as humans. But a report by Leadership IQ, a US-based employee engagement survey firm, offers contradictory evidence. As per the report, 46 per cent of all new hires sourced manually fail within 18 months. On the contrary, AI-driven platforms offer up to 23 per cent improvement in talent retention, while also reducing human bias and giving access to a larger pool of candidates.
Screening: The lack of physical presence in a virtual working world limits the ability of an interviewer to assess a candidate on body language cues. Moreover, there are higher chances of frauds such as impersonation and cheating on assessments creeping in. To tackle this, the hiring industry has taken cues from more technologically sound sectors such as BFSI and gaming. By introducing facial recognition, machine learning, liveness detection and natural language processing to hiring journeys, organizations can compare a candidate to their NID and ensure that the same person goes through each stage of screening. Building intelligence into hiring journeys, these technologies offer detailed analytics and AI-based scoring on parameters such as candidate's expressions, voice emotion to enable standardized hiring at scale in any part of the country.
Verification: If AI-powered, database-driven and tech-oriented verification was optional before, it emerged as the need of the hour in the pandemic era. As establishments such as schools, universities, offices, courts and even police stations shut their buildings, organizations found themselves incapable of verifying candidate identity, address, employment records, criminal records, etc. We, at AuthBridge, had many new clients, who had previously only worked with physical vendors, turn to us to build technology and intelligence into their background verification processes to improve access, speed, scalability, and efficiency. Some of the top technologies that are changing the game here include, image recognition for identity verification, geo-coordinate capture for address verification, deep search algorithms and data analytics for court record and criminal checks.
Onboarding: An end-to-end digital onboarding process that not only ensures minimal paperwork and manual intervention but also offers a great candidate experience remotely is what many leading companies needed the past year. This has created an exceptional demand for onboarding solutions that merge with HRMS and ATS systems through API-integration to create standardized and seamless onboarding journeys on a single platform. Digital documentation and e-sign solutions are in top demand due to their ability to create legally binding contracts between stakeholders in any part of the country. AI-based, gamified onboarding experiences are taking virtual onboarding to the next-level by enabling customizable interactions through deep learning.
Retention: As per Gallup, an analytics and advisory company, the cost of replacing an employee can be one and a half to two times her annual salary package. In today's competitive job market where 60 per cent companies surveyed in India by Mercer Mett said they were looking to hire talent for new positions, this figure is even more worrying. Use of AI and big data can help with employee retention by identifying higher risk employees through studying attrition data. Moreover, AI can be used to design employee engagement initiatives catered to certain departments, employees at a certain seniority level, and as per other employee needs.
The Future of AI in Hiring
As per the data shared by ideal., a recruitment automation software, adoption of AI into hiring process can save up to 23 hours per hire, reduce hiring costs by up to 75 per cent and lead to 35 per cent decrease in employee turnover and 20 per cent increase in performance. This is barely scratching the surface of the true potential of AI. As more organizations introduce AI to their hiring processes, HR will become increasingly data-driven and assume more strategic roles. The tech reckoning can start a whole new innings for HR professionals who are willing to keep up with the pace.
